r accomplished his life work without
having reached a play interest in it."

The saving power of organized play, in the prevention and cure of that
morbidity which especially besets youth, can hardly be overestimated.
This diseased self-consciousness is intimately connected with nervous
tensions and reflexes from sex conditions and not infrequently passes
over into sex abuse or excess of some sort. So that the diversion of
strenuous athletic games, and the consequent use of energy up to a point
just below exhaustion, is everywhere recognized as an indispensable
moral prophylactic. Solitariness, overwrought nervous states, the
intense and suggestive stimuli of city life, call for a large measure of
this wholesome treatment for the preservation of the moral integrity of
the boy, his proper self-respect, and those ideals of physical
development which will surely make all forms of self-abuse or indulgence
far less likely.

The normal exhilaration of athletic games, which cannot be described to
those without experience, is often what is blindly and injuriously
sought by the young cigarette smoker in the realm of nervous excitation
without the proper motor accompaniments. Possibly if we had not so
restricted our school-yards and overlooked the necessity for a physical
trainer and organized play, we would not have schools in which as many
as 80 per cent of the boys between ten and seventeen years of age are
addicted to cigarettes. In trying to fool Nature in this way the boy
pays a heavy penalty in the loss of that very decisiveness, force, and
ability in mind and body which properly accompany athletic recreation.
The increased circulation and oxidization of the blood is in itself a
great tonic and when one reflects that, with a running pace of six miles
an hour the inhalation of air increases from four hundred and eighty
cubic inches per minute to three thousand three hundred and sixty cubic
inches, the tonic effect of the athletic game will be better
appreciated. This increased use of oxygen means healthy stimulation,
growth of lung capacity, and exaltation of spirit without enervation.
"Health comes in through the muscles but flies out through the nerves."

It was well thought and arranged by the ancients
[says Martin Luther] that young people should exercise
themselves and have something creditable and useful
to do. Therefore I like these two exercises and
amusements best, namely, music and chiv