keep
noxious microbes and certain poisons outside our systems or in their
proper places within. (It has been shown that we cannot live without
microbes, and that there exist normally in some parts of the body
substances which are powerfully poisonous to other parts.) Rational
cleanliness makes for health, for survival. It is, ultimately, an
expression of the Will to Live.

[Sidenote: _DIRT_]

Far, however, from being rational, our notions on cleanliness are in
the highest degree superficial. We make a great fuss over a flea;
hardly mention it in polite company; but we tolerate the dirty housefly
on all our food. We eat high game which our cook's more natural taste
calls muck. We are only just beginning to realise the indescribable
filthiness of carious teeth, than which anything more unclean, a few
diseases excepted, can scarcely be found in slums. Even in this great
age of pseudo-scientific enlightenment, we do not have a carious tooth
extracted until it aches, though we have a front tooth cleaned and
stopped on the first appearance of decay. What the eye doth not see....
Yet we presume to judge men by their deviation from our conventional
standards of cleanliness.

My lady goes to the doctor for her headaches and _crises de nerfs_.
"Dyspepsia and autotoxaemia," says the doctor. "Try such-and-such a diet
for a month, then go to Aix-les-Bains." But how would my lady be
ashamed did he tell her plainly: "Madam, though I observe that you
bathe frequently, your cleanliness, like your beauty, is only
skin-deep. You are fair without and foul within. Your alimentary canal
is overloaded and your blood is so unclean that it has poisoned your
nervous system. Eat less, take more exercise and drink plenty--of
water. Try to be as clean as your gardener." It has been remarked that
the labourer who sweats at his work is, in reality, far cleaner than
the bathing sedentary man, for the labourer has a daily sweat-bath,
whereas the other only washes the outside of him: the cleanliness of
the latter is skin-deep, and of the former blood-deep. Once stated, the
fact is obvious. Moreover, the labourer has the additional advantage of
being self-cleansing, whereas the sedentary man, for his inferior kind
of cleanliness, requires a bath and all sorts of apparatus. No doubt,
in time we shall learn to value both kinds of cleanliness, each at its
worth. The Martians of fiction, when in a fair way to conquer the
earth, succumbed before earthly m