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THE EFFICIENT LIFE

In a merry mood

Laying down tlie law

Bending forward In earnest arfriiment

THE EXPRESSIONS OF VARIOUS EMOTIO?

Copjright 19",'2, Underwood k Underwood

An adverse proposition

CopTrisht lt".>2, Underwr.o.1 i Unier«oud

Administering reproof

Coprrieht 19"2. Tnlerwr^M A Tnilerwood Copjright 1902, Undenrood & Underwood

Attitude of ursrent appeal Pointing out fallacy

WITH THE MAINTENANCE OF A STRONG SPINE

The Efficient Life

LUTHER H. GULICK, M. D.

Direct9r of Physical Training
in the New Yiri City Schools

WITH DOUBLE-PAGE
FRONTISPIECE

New York

Doubleday, Page Sc Company

1907

DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & COMPANY

Published, March, 1907

including that of translation into foreign languages

including the Scandinavian

I'HEODORE ROOSEVELT

WHO SOMETIMES LEADS THE SIMPLE LIFE,

WHO OFTEN LEADS THE STRENUOUS

LIFE, BUT WHO ALWAYS LEADS

THE EFFICIENT UFB

A WORD TO THE REAbM

Mj father once had medical care of an Hawsiiaii
Chief, one of the Kamehamehas, I beliere. The
treatment inrolved the use of a rather drastic pill
crery evening for a number of days. The result
of the first day's pill was so favourable that the
chief took the rest of the boxful at once. His life
was saved with great difficulty. So do not attempt
to carry out all the suggestions in this book at once.

Take a chapter at a time. Mark freely all ideas
that strike you favourably — jot down at the end of
each chapter a few words to indicate the extent to
which you think it applicable to yourself. Only under-
take at first what seems to fit your one greatest need.

LUTHEB H. GULICK, M. D.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

rAOE

Introduction . • . •

Speed

Efficiency

. 7

Life that is Worth While .

IV.

States of Mind and States of Body

. 23

The Body Shows Character

VI.

Exercise — Its Use and Abuse

. 49

vn.

Meat, Drink, and the Table

vm.

The Business of Digestion . •

. 73

IX.

Waste

The Attack on Constipation • •

. 93

XI.

Fatigue

103

xn.

Sleep

. 115

xm.

Stimulants and Other Whips

129

XIV.

The Bath— For Body and Soul

. 141

XV.

Pain — ^The Danger Signal

151

XVI.

Vision

. 161

xvn.

VitaHty— The Armour of Offence

177

xvra.

Growth in Best ....

. 187

INTRODUCTION

"P\URING the past year one of my friends,
a man of national reputation, died
at the age of forty-six. It was said that his
death was the result of overwork, and that
the ultimate cause was failure of the kidneys.
I knew his habits of work intimately, and I
do not believe that the work alone could
account for the sad result, which took him
away in the prime of life and at a time when
all his experiences qualified him to do better
work than he had ever done before. I
think the fundamental trouble was that
he did not know how to run his physical
machinery.

Shortly before this, another friend of
mine, a man of international renown, died
in his prime. Failure of the kidneys was
also given as the immediate cause, and over-
work as the predisposing cause. I have
no doubt as to the correctness of this diag-
nosis; but I know that this man, although
he was living a sedentary life, ate the quan-
tity and kind of food of a man engaged in

ziii

xlv Introduction

out-of-door, muscular work. Thus for many
years he had seriously overtaxed his digestive
organs, by overloading them with food.
His heart was always rapid; his arteries
became hard — ^he had gout. Much, if not
all of his trouble could probably have been
removed had he consented to lessen his
consumption of meat, thus decreasing the
work required of the kidneys.

In the course of the past month one of
the most brilliant young men of letters in
America has been obliged to give up his
work for a long period, in order to seek
health. Another friend, a woman thirty-
nine years of age, has for a great part of her
life had violent headaches every week or
ten days. She discovered two years ago
that these were permanently cured by eating
less starchy food. Her digestion of starch
was imperfect. And so, I presume, all
those who read this will be able to recall
friends who have been either removed
from life or from full service, at im-
portant and critical times, simply be-
cause they did not know how to conduct
their lives.

Introduetion xv

This little book is entitled, "The Efficient
Life," because efficiency is the ideal. To
be strenuous is no end in itself. It is only
when being strenuous is an aid to efficiency
that it is worth while; and sometimes the
quiet life is more effective than the strenuous
one. The pursuit of health is not an end
in itself. But to live a full, rich, efficient
life is an end. I hope that these suggestions
will prove in book form — as they have
already proven in lecture form — useful in
helping people to discover how they may
improve that degree of efficiency which they
individually possess.

Many of the chapters in this book were
originally lectures delivered at the School
of Pedagogy, New York University. A
friend who had attended, took my notes,
manuscript, and fragments, and wrote many
of the chapters as they now stand. So if
any of those who know me are so kind as to
think that I have shown any new and un-
expected gift of expression in this little
volume, they must attribute it to Mr. Harry
James Smith, who is at present one of the
staff of the Atlantic Monthly,

xvl Introduction

Thanks are due' the editors of The
World's Work and of Good Housekeeping
for permission to use articles which first
appeared in those magazines.

Luther Halsey Gulick.

SPEED

CHAPTER I

TN RUNNING a short distance, such as
fifty yards, one may put every ounce
of his energy into each effort. Even breath-
ing may be suspended to advantage, for the
ribs when stationary give a firmer support to
the muscles attached to them which are used
in running. But the man who undertakes
to run a mile at the pace of a fifty-yard dash
will be badly beaten by the man who knows
the pace of maximum efficiency and takes
advantage of it.

The same law holds in intellectual under-
takings. It is true that in times of emer-
gency a man may work intensely and with
profit, for eighteen hours per day: examina-
tions may be passed, important addresses
completed, or sudden and momentous cases
at law prepared. In the interest of maxi-
mum efficiency one may subsist at such times
upon small amounts of predigested foods,
one may get along without exercise, without
sleep, without relaxation of any kind. To
a constitution well organised and intel-

4 The Efficient Life

ligently controlled such spurts of work need
not prove harmful. But the man who at-
tempts to do the work of a year or of a life-
time at this pace will actually accomplish
far less than if he went more slowly. It is
not the point of maximum efficiency except
for a spurt, and spurts do not win distance-
races unless prepared for by a long period of
wise running. The man who wins takes a
pace that he can hold for the entire distance,
and he will have a little extra "up his sleeve"
to draw upon at the finish when the victory is
a matter of a few feet or even of a few inches.

EFFICIENCY

CHAPTER II

TT IS the kind of work in which a man
is engaged which determines for him
the special meaning of the term efficiency.
The success of his efforts may depend wholly
upon the quantity of his output, or it may
depend upon its quality. Quantity! Qual-
ity! Upon these two hang all the laws of
efficiency.

Mere quantity is the measure of success
for the man who shovels coal or digs in a
ditch. Even the best of us have a con-
siderable amount of pure hack-work to do:
but as we go up the scale of human activity,
quality counts more and more. The con-
ditions of life when one can do work of the
highest quality, demanding imagination,
insight, vision, and creative power, are
higher than the conditions when merely the
maximum in quantity is demanded. The
higher the quality of the work, the greater
the nervous cost of it, and the more highly
perfected must be the machine that does it.

The conditions for efficiency in the case
7

8 The Efficient Life

of the ordinary day labourer are not complex.
His work is that of a coarse machine, turn-
ing out, like a grain thresher, a great
amount of production relatively low in
grade. His efficiency is but little disturbed
by constant feeding upon indigestible vic-
tuals, by frequent carousals, by a dirty skin
and bad air. Low-grade production does
not need a high-grade organism.

But if under conditions of special strin-
gency you press the day labourer to the ut-
most of his strength, one of two things
happens. Either he goes to pieces and be-
comes useless; or his machinery alters,
developing into something more highly
organised, which requires more delicate care
and which rebels more certainly under
abuse. The conditions of health for him —
that is to say, of ''wholeness," of normal
power — are more complex, more ex-
acting. The coarser the machine, the
more easily it maintains its balance. There
is a criterion of efficiency for the thresh-
ing machine, but it is not that of a high-
grade watch.

Men have in a few days developed ideas.

Efficiency 9

formulated plans, written poems that were
worth more to mankind than a lifetime of
work whose value was estimated in terms of
quantity. The health of the thinker, of the
financier, of the executive genius, demands
a momentary alertness of all the faculties,
an ability to grasp, to originate, to carry out,
a trained perception and an intelligent dis-
crimination. He must be the master of a
delicate, high-grade machine calculated to
carry on high-grade work. His health is
upon an absolutely different level from that
of the farmhand or the coal shoveller.

Nothing could be more misleading than
the familiar phrase, "healthy as a savage."
The health of the savage is nothing to
boast of. He has only a moderate control
over his purely physical faculties. His
power of endurance is limited, he is helpless
in an emergency, he has no power of con-
tinued attention. Health such as his is a
low-grade achievement.

For the larger number of city men and
women, the conditions of efficiency are
related more to the quality than to the
quantity of their output. It pays for us to

to The Efficient Life

learn how to run our machines on the higher
levels of quality-efficiency. **Live at your
best," is a safe motto for everyone whose
work calls for brain rather than brawn.
The world rewards the man of brains.
Through an excess of hack-work a man of
native power may stand in the way of his
own greatest success, for he is keeping his
blood so full of the products of overwork
and his nerve batteries so depleted that
their best discharge is impossible. Big work
demands high pressure, reserve power. Any
engineer can pull his throttle wide open and
soon lower the steam pressure to such an ex-
tent that great work is impossible till steam
is raised again. People are constantly doing
this. They do not keep up the supply of
nervous energy to that point where big ideas
or great execution are possible. They let
themselves be so ground down by the deadly
details of daily work that the real things,
the great opportunities, slip by through lack
of power to act at the critical moment.

To give one's self the best chance possible
for insight, largeness of view, and inspira-
tion, is clearly the part of wisdom. It may

Efficiency ll

be true, to be sure, that for a man who has
never known any moments of larger life,
who has never had any idea of value, the
effort necessary to keep the machine on
those high levels of power would not be
worth while. A draught horse does not
need for its kind of efficiency the same
care that the race horse demands. The
steam shovel does not need the special care
bestowed upon a watch.

It is my conviction, however, that capa-
bilities of a peculiar character exist in
almost everyone; and that a man's value
to society depends, to a large extent, upon
his discovering and developing his special
talent. The number of those who have a
right to live complacently upon any other
level than that of maximum efficiency is
certainly small, for to do so implies that no
further growth is possible for them.

It is not the intention in this book to pro-
vide an easy recipe for the development of
genius. What it seeks is to enable each
man to discover and secure for himself the
best attainable conditions for his own daily
life. It aims to apply to the various details

12 The Efficient Life

of that life our present knowledge of physiol-
ogy and psychology in a common sense
and practical way.

For each of us it is possible to increase
the duration of his best moments and to
render them more frequent. It is also pos-
sible for us to reduce the number and the
length of those periods of depression and
low vitality when our work miscarries and
our lives lack snap and enthusiasm. If we
succeed in bringing about such a change, we
shall have raised the whole plane of our
living to something higher and more admir-
able. Our work will be productive of
results that would otherwise have been
quite beyond our reach.

There are conditions for each individual
under which he can do the most and the best
work. It is his business to ascertain those
conditions and to comply with them.

LIFE THAT IS WORTH
WHILE

CHAPTER III

T IFE is not only for work. It is for
one's self and for one's friends. The
degree of joy that a man finds in his work
is due to two things : the intensity or fullness
of his vitality, and the congenial character
of the work itself. When one is thoroughly
well and vigorous, the mere joy of living, of
merely being alive, is very great. At such
a time the nature of the work does not mat-
ter to a large extent. The sense of having
power at your command, and the delight of
exerting it even in coal shovelling or selling
goods is enough. When one is full of life,
the mere feel of fresh water or air on the
skin, the taste of the plainest food, the
exertion of muscular effort, the keeness of
one's vision, the sight of colour in the sky,
or the sound of the wind or the waves — it
takes nothing beyond these to make one
jubilant, enthusiastic.

To a man who is fatigued such sensations
are sure to be without zest, even if they are
not positively unpleasant. One of the com-

i6 The Efficient Life

monest reasons for the blase or pessimistic
feeUngs that so often come when youth is
over is that one's system is constantly tired
and rebels at additional sense-stimuli.

As a matter of fact, the vividness of one's
feelings, of one's emotional experience, ought
not to depart with youth. In a normal life
it should deepen, to be sure, and be respon-
sive to even larger and greater things; but
it should retain its brightness and depth of
colour. Love, hope, desire, appreciation,
ambition and determination should grow,
not diminish, with experience.

To live at a low level is to deaden every
faculty for high thought and high feeling —
it makes drudgery not only of work but also
of life.

Many mothers slave for their children so
many hours a day that they have but little
energy left with which to enjoy them and
love them. As a result, the dullness and
drudgery of existence are all they come to
experience. One mother of five children
for years took at least an hour a day for
rest and quiet reading alone by herself.
Nothing but absolute necessity would

Life That is Worth While 17

induce her to break into this hour. The
result of this is not only that she has kept
her own superb health, but more than this :
she is a constant joy and inspiration to her
children, her husband and her friends. It
is true that she might have done more dust-
ing or mending stockings than she actually
accompHshed, but it would have been at the
sacrifice of that whole part of her life which
meant the most to herself and others.
Instead of being able to enter upon the rou-
tine of each day with eagerness and satisfac-
tion, it would have been the intolerable
drudgery that it is for so many tired mothers.
Even in the matter of the quantity of
the work accomplished it seems probable
that the daily rest was wise, for the remainder
of the day was lived more intensely, its
work was done more rapidly, and best of all,
that balance and poise were preserved
which we all lose if over tired. When
fatigued to a certain point, every one of us
loses his sense of proportion: we go on
fretting over little things and doing ineffec-
tual work just because we have not strength
enough to stop.

i8 The Efficient Life

Children inevitably grow away from
mothers who do not keep themselves grow-
ing and their lives vivid. The mere minis-
tering to the physical needs of children is not
enough. They need our best selves after
they are babies. During the years of their
childhood and later we shall only serve them
fully by living at our best, by living with
inspiration and power. This it is impossible
to do if we are daily over fatigued. We
must live joyful, rich, vivid lives, not only
for ourselves, but for our children and for
all whom we love.

Full living, high-level living, is one of the
conditions of continuous growth. Growth
in power to see and to appreciate and to do
should increase every year right into old age
itself. You remember how the old scholar
speaks in Browning's "By the Fireside":

My own, confirm me, if we tread

This pathway back, is it not in pride.

To think how little we dreamed it led
To an age so blest that by its side

Youth seems the waste indeed ?

It is certain that if a man, who starts out
with a good heredity, sets himself at the

Life That is Worth While 19

eflFort of constantly living at his best, the
right kind of growth will come to him. If
we take the machine at any stage and crowd
it to its full capacity every day, we not only
get low-level work from it, but there is
failure all along the line. We bless the
world by being happy, full of dash and vim,
ready for any enterprise, alert for the new
idea or the new application of the old one.

For a man to look back at childhood as
the one happy time in life shows that he has
missed something important. The happiest
people are the men and women in the full
maturity of their powers, who have kept
youth's vividness of feeling, but who have
added to this those great resources of life
that are not open to children.

This matter of keeping one's self on a
high level relates then not only to better
work, but in an equally important degree to
the attainment of a fuller, richer, more
joyous life.

STATES OF MIND AND
STATES OF BODY

CHAPTER IV

PSYCHOLOGISTS are learning nowa-
days that it is impossible to treat the
mind and the body as if they were really
distinct. They have discovered that the
two are so closely bound up together that
nothing can affect one without affecting the
other in a greater or less degree.

Our feelings, our emotional experiences,
were formerly treated as "mental phenom-
ena." We still keep the phrase ''states of
mind." But we might just as accurately
say "states of body." There is no such
thing as an emotion without its bodily
expression.

A man gets angry. His breath comes
short, his heart beats violently, the blood
rushes to his face, his hands clench, his
limbs may even quiver and grow tense. If
you could subtract all these s3maptoms from
a fit of anger, it is hard to say how much of
the fit would still remain. They are essen-
tial parts of that "state of mind."

An emotion may involve all the functions

24 The Efficient Life

of the body — circulation, blood pressure,
muscular tension, respiration, glandular
activities, and the rest.

Even ordinary thinking has its bodily
effects, though they are not often brought
to our attention. If I put an exceedingly
delicate thermometer in each hand, and
then give my attention to my right hand
with all the concentration of mind I can
muster, it will soon begin to grow warmer
than my left. Somehow or other the blood
circulation in it has been increased; even
the diameter of it is greater, and all the
tissue changes in it are going on at a higher
speed.

The scientist's explanation of this is
interesting. During all the history of man's
evolution from a lower form, the act of
thinking, he says, has normally been con-
nected with some activity of the body.
Men thought because they were going to
act. Thought had its origin for the sake
of action.

This association of the two became
ingrained, and even now when we think in
such a way that some part of the body is

States of Mind and States of Body 25

concerned the automatic nerve centres begin
to increase the blood supply to that part so
that it may be ready for action.

A man thinks of running. The nerve
centres send more blood to his legs; all the
muscles used in running get an increased
supply of it. A man is hungry; he thinks
of a good, juicy beefsteak. Immediately
more blood is sent to the muscles of mastica-
tion and to the salivary glands. Saliva is
poured into the mouth, and even the walls
of the stomach begin to secrete gastric
juice and to prepare themselves for the
digestion of the hypothetical dinner.

Now this fact has a tremendously practi-
cal application. Suppose that a man has an
uneasy sensation in the locality of his heart
which is due, let us say, to overeating or to
gas in the stomach. But he begins to think
that he has heart disease. He reads the
**ads" in the newspapers to learn about
the symptoms — and he learns about them.

** A sense of constriction about the chest."
Yes, that is his difficulty exactly! "Slight
pain on deep breathing, palpitation of
the heart after vigorous exercise" — it is

26 The Efficient Life

evidently a serious case ! He begins to worry
about it. Worry interferes with his sleep.
It interferes also with his digestion; he does
not get well nourished.

Bad sleep and bad digestion make him
worse and worse. Each one aggravates the
other. And all the time he keeps thinking
about the heart. In the end, his thinking
actually affects its condition, until he suc-
ceeds in fastening on himself a functional
difficulty which may be a really serious
and permanent trouble — and the whole of
it can be traced back to his crooked think-
ing about that little pain in his chest.

This is no parable. It is the record of
hundreds of actual cases. Every physi-
cian comes into contact with them.

A man who keeps worrying about the
state of his liver, will almost be sure to have
trouble with it eventually. Indigestion can
be brought on in the same way, and a long
list of other ailments.

The nervous system has adapted itself
to the increasing complexity of modern life.
It has grown more sensitive. It has become
more dehcate in its adjustments. This lets

States of Mind and States of Body 27

us do a higher grade of work when we are
at our best; but the machinery gets out of
order more easily. The role that the
psychic part of us plays in the government
of the rest is increasing in importance all
the time.

That is why worry is such a tremen-
dously expensive indulgence. Worry is
nothing but a diluted, dribbling fear, long-
drawn out; and its effects on the organism
are of the same kind, only not so sudden.

No kind of psychic activity can be so
persistently followed as worry. A fit of
anger exhausts itself in a short time. Con-
centrated intellectual work reaches the
fatigue point after a few hours. But worry
grows by what it feeds on. It increases in
proportion as it gets expression. You can
worry more and worry harder on the fourth
day than you could on the first. Every
normal activity is strangled by it, and it is
only a question of time before the man who
worries hard enough will be sick or un-
balanced.

But there is another side to the situation.
If states of mind can hinder a man's effi-

28 The Efficient Life

ciency, they can also help it. Positive and
healthful emotions bring increased power.
The simplest food taken when we are wor-
ried will often enough cause indigestion;
while a man can go to a banquet and pile in
raw clams, oxtail soup, roast beef, mush-
rooms, veal, caviare, roast duck, musk-
melons, roquefort, and coffee, have a superb
time, and never feel any ill effects. Not
everything depends on the state of mind;
but much does.

There is certainly plenty of foolish philos-
ophy connected with Christian Science,
mental healing, and other kindred move-
ments; but thousands of people have been
tremendously benefited by them. This is
largely due to the emphasis they all lay upon
the healthful emotions, upon the positive,
the believing, the buoyant, and hopeful
attitude towards one's self and one's troubles.

To resolve to *'play the game" and to
play it for all it is worth is the best start a
man can take toward setting himself right.
I know people who are really out of order,
whose heart or lungs are really crippled,
but who make the best of it, who have

States of Mind and States of Body 29

learned just what they can do and what
they cannot do. They do not think about
their troubles, and no one would even know
that anything was wrong with them. They
lead efficient lives. They accomplish more
than most people in perfect health.

I know other men who have nothing serious
the matter with them, but who fail to be
efficient just because they are always turn-
ing their introspective microscopes upon
their condition. They are troubled about
everything they eat and wonder whether it
will hurt them or not. They suspect each
glass of water or milk to contain injurious
microbes. They do not eat strawberries
because they are afraid appendicitis may
lurk there. They do not drink water at
meals because they have been told it causes
indigestion. They never dare let go of
themselves and have a good time, for fear
they may overdo. The real root of all
their misery is their state of mind. If they
only knew how to get at that, they could
become as well off as the best of us.

But one great difficulty with people who
worry is that they do not know how to get

30 The Efficient Life

at it. They know that it does them harm,
and they make an earnest resolution to
stop. There is no use in that. Nobody
ever stopped worrying by making good
resolutions. It is contrary to the first
principles of psychology; the mind does not
work that way.

The more a man braces himself against
worry, the more worry will get its grip on
him. He even begins to worry lest he is
going to worry. He worries over his good
resolutions, and worries because he is not
living up to them.

Emotions do not have handles that can be
gotten hold of by main strength, by an act
of the will. You cannot attack them sub-
jectively.

A man who is in the dumps can say to
himself : * ' Come now, brace up ! Be cheer-
ful!" but that will not make him so. What
he can do and do successfully, is to make
himself act the way a cheerful man would
act: to walk and talk the way a cheerful
man would walk and talk, and to eat what a
cheerful man would eat — and after a time
the emotion slips into line with his assumed

States of Mind and States of Body 31

attitude. He actually becomes what he
was been pretending to be.

We can get at worry in exactly the same
manner. We can make ourselves do cer-
tain specific things. This is an objective,
not subjective method.

See that all the hours of the day are so
full of interesting and healthful occupations
that there is no chance for worry to stick its
nose in.

Exchanging symptoms is a vicious pastime.
It always makes the symptoms themselves
worse; and it is contagious: it gives them
to other people by suggestion. Nothing
could be more demoralizing than the way
invalids, semi-invalids, and chronic com-
plainers get together day after day to talk
over how they feel. Crap-shooting would be
a more uplifting occupation. If such cases
ever get cured, it is in spite of themselves.

Every man should be provided with his
own smoke consumer. It is a menace to
the community to have him pouring out
clouds of black smoke over his unoffending
friends. They will not thank him for it.
And the soot may stick to them.

32 The Efficient Life

Every man ought to have a hobby of
some kind or other, one which demands a
certain amount of physical work, so that
when he gets, through his business there will
be something interesting for him to do —
something which he can talk and think
about with pleasure. The business of the
following day will go more smoothly, more
successfully, if it is forgotten for a while.
When a man is tired there is no use in keep-
ing his head at work over business. It is
the old difficulty of the bow that is never
unbent.

The man who will persistently ^lay well
is doing something worth while ; he is taking
the most sensible and practical method of
really getting there. He can act happy
even if he does not feel so. He can stand
up straight, look the world in the face,
breathe deeply. He can make up his mind
to tell a funny story at the table even if it
kills him.

It will not kill him.

THE BODY SHOWS
CHARACTER

CHAPTER V

IVTEN with thick, straight, strong necks
^ ^ are as a rule good fighters. They
may not be quick, but they are usually
tenacious. They do not know when they
are "licked." Theodore Roosevelt is a
good illustration of the fighting physique
and carriage. Some pictures are given of
him in order to show how one may main-
tain a "strong" carriage during the succes-
sive expression of many and divergent
emotional states.

Many city business men in middle Jife
have bodies that disgrace them. Every-
where you see fat, clumsy, unsightly bodies ;
stooped, flabby, feeble bodies; each and
every degree of dilapidation and ineffi-
ciency. These bodies are not capable ser-
vants of their owners. They cannot do
half the work they ought to do. They can-
not give joy and pride. They do not pro-
mote self-respect.

One reason for this is their carriage.
The majority of men you pass on a city

36 The Efficient Life'

street carry themselves in a slovenly manner.
Observe this the next time yoa are out.
Perhaps the first man you notice will be
slipping along with his chest flat abdomen
protuberant, head forward. The next will
be fat and remind you of an inverted wedge :
slim in the chest, but gradually spreading
out below. With every step he takes he has
to make a special effort. His weight is a
costly drain upon his energy. The third
man may be tall and thin, with a difference
of about two inches in the height of his
shoulders. He is a bookkeeper. Through
his habit of always carrying something on
his left arm and of bending over his desk with
his weight on his right shoulder, he has
gradually stretched the muscles out of shape.
Not only has the position of the shoulders
been altered, but there is even a slight
curvature of the spine itself.

You will meet with all the variations on
these three principal types of bad carriage.
Not one man out of ten carries himself so as
to look his best. He does not even give true
indication of his real self. He possesses more
courage, more personality, than he shows.

The Body Shows Character 37

But looks are not the main thing. The
way a man stands and walks has bearing
upon his health, upon his efficiency. If he
stands always with his chest flat and his
head forward, his breathing is shallow and
he never makes his diaphragm do its full
work. By itself, the effects of this are
enough to help rob him of vigour. In the
case of the man whose abdomen is so over-
laid with fat that he walks clumsily, it is
also true that he has an impaired blood
circulation and defective respiration.

One reason for the bad carriage you see
in people is that they do not know what is
good carriage, nor how to acquire it. The
commonest direction is, "Hold up your
head." That does not hit at the real
difficulty at all. A man can take any
amount of pains with his head and chin, and
still keep in abominable position. Changing
the angle of the head does not improve
things o

*' Throw your shoulders back," is an-
other familiar piece of advice, and one
which comes no nearer the point than the
first. The position of the shoulders has

38 The Efficient Life

hardly any effect upon the position of the
body. The shoulders hang upon the out-
side of the body like blinds on a house.
Shift their place as much as you like; you
do not change the shape of the chest-
cavity.

There is only one way of doing that, and
that is by getting the back and neck where
they belong, by keeping the spine erect.
This proposition is easier to talk about than
to carry out. It cannot be carried out unless
a man is willing to make a determined effort.
Attention is what counts.

Students in military schools acquire good
habits of standing and walking during the
first six or eight weeks of their course.
They acquire them so thoroughly that the
matter needs practically no further care
during later years. Constant attention is
the explanation. At a military school a
new student is kept watch of during all his
waking hours. He is not allowed to stand,
to sit, to walk, in any position except the
best. Thus the whole organism gets grad-
ually trained into the new habit.

The military student is also put through

The Body Show$ Character 3$

special exercise for arms and back; but
exercise is not the main factor in the pro-
cess. People have the notion that exercise
will make the muscles of a man's back so
strong that they will pull him up straight
without any thought on his part. This is
contrary to facts. The back of a coal
shoveller is bent, even though it is covered
with coils of muscle. The truth is that a
man's back tends to keep the same position
in rest which it had during exercise. The
coal heaver does his work with a bent back,
and during rest it stays bent.

Standing straight is primarily a matter
of habit, not of muscle. It depends upon
a man's nervous control. The nerve centres
need to be trained; and this can be accom-
plished only by constant and persistent
attention.

If a man would rigidly hold his body in
good position for two months, he would
probably keep on doing so always. He
would have formed neural and muscular
habits that would look out for the matter
themselves. But there must be no '* times
off," no let up in the forming of a habit.

40 The Efficient Life

Now there is a simple direction that fits
most cases: Keep the neck pressed hack
against the collar. That will do the work.

The ribs are attached to the spine in such
a way that when the spine is right, they are
held in the best possible position. This
increases the chest-cavity, the lungs have
free room to expand, the heart action is
vigorous and unimpeded, the diaphragm
gets a good purchase on the chest-walls.

The effect on the organs lower down is
equally important. The stomach on the
left side and the liver on the right side fit up
close against the concave diaphragm muscle.
The circulation tends to be poorer in the
liver than anywhere else in the body. This
is because the blood cannot flow through it
directly and freely, but must be squeezed
through a double network of small veins and
capillaries. This is one reason why seden-
tary people are so likely to be bilious.

The liver is something like a sponge, and
the diaphragm is like a hand that rests over
it. When the diaphragm contracts vigor-
ously, it exerts a certain pressure on the
liver. Then it relaxes. This alternate con-

The Body Shows Character 41

traction and relaxation is one of the main
factors in keeping the liver working well.
I have known many people who were slightly
bilious to remedy their trouble completely by
simply taking deep breathing exercises three
or four times a day.

It is clear enough that a stooping posture
must decrease the eflBciency of the heart
and the lungs, and injure the work of the
liver. But its bad ejffects do not stop there.
When the abdomen is habitually relaxed
and allowed to sag forward — as usually
happens when people stand badly — all the
important organs inside slip downward a
little; they lie lower than they should. I
have often known the lower border of the
stomach to have dropped two or three inches
from this single cause. Just why this con-
dition should result as it does, I am still
uncertain. Perhaps it is due to a stretching
of the nerves or blood vessels — ^but at all
events, the tone of the whole system is sure
to be lowered; the organs grow flabby and
do their work sluggishly.

Time and again I have succeeded in
curing troubles which I was assured were

4^ The Efficient Life

organic and serious just by getting the
patient to stand up straight, to walk correctly,
and to breathe deeply.

Now it is a sad fact that simply knowing
how to stand up straight will not remedy
the difficulty. What counts is not the num-
ber of remedies we may have on our tongue's
end, but the use we make of the remedies.
Directions have been supplied. How is a
man going to carry them out ? This is the
most practical question of all.

In the first place, he must depend upon
himself. There are many braces sold that
pretend to accomplish the desired results.
They claim to hold the shoulders back, to
hold the head up, to set the faulty position
of the trunk right. But the truth is that the
longer a man uses braces, the less able he
will be to stand up straight.

If the braces are strong enough to make a
real pull on the shoulders, they are doing the
work that belongs to the muscles; and that
means that the muscles are getting less and
less capable every day of doing it for them«^
selves. It is the old law of use and disuse.

In any case, as we have already seen, it is

The Body Shows Character 43

not the shoulders that are really at the root
of the trouble. Round shoulders are the
result of bad carriage, not the cause of it.

The next pointer is never to exercise
except in a good position. The body will
tend to keep that position after the exercise
is over. Visit any gymnasium you like and
observe the way the men stand at the pulleys.
They have no realisation of the effect it will
have upon their habits of body carriage.
During all exercises the body should be held
in the finest position possible.

Then finally there are one or two simple
exercises that have a special value for this
very difficulty.

(1) Inhale slowly and as strongly as
possible. At the same time press the neck
back firmly against the collar. Now hold
it there hard. There is no harm in doing
this in an exaggerated way. The object is
to straighten out that part of the back which
is directly between the shoulders. This
deepens the chest.

(2) For men who are fat, this exercise
is suggested:

Keep a good standing position. Draw

44 The Efficient Life

in the abdomen vigorously as far as
possible. Hold it there a moment and let
it out again. Repeat this ten times the
first day, and increase until it can be done
fifty times both morning and night. Every
time you think of it during the day, with-
draw the abdomen vigorously. This will
strengthen the muscles that hold it in
place.

Queer as it may seem on first thought,
there are times when it is a good thing to
drop or "slump," as it is commonly called.
When one becomes exceedingly fatigued,
the blood pressure of the body is lowered.
The blood tends to accumulate in the abdo-
men under such conditions. When the
back bends forward and the chest gets flat,
the ribs press upon the abdominal contents.
The result is that more blood is pressed
into the general circulation. Thus blood
pressure is raised.

The attitude of action is that of standing
firmly. The attitude of contemplation and
of intense attention, as well as of fatigue, is
with the head bent forward and very pos-
sibly with the hand supporting the head.

The Body Shows Character 45

If a person habitually takes this position,
then it is of no value when he is fatigued.
Only the person who stands well usually
can take advantage of this stimulus to the
circulation when fatigued.

Good carriage is directly connected with
a man's feeling of self-respect. If he
slouches along with his eyes on the ground
and his abdomen sagging, he is not in the
position to have the strong and healthy
feelings of self respect that the man has who
stands erect, looks the world straight in the
eye, keeps his chest prominent, his abdomen
in, and his body under thorough control —
a *' chesty" man.

If you are walking along the street and
wake up to the fact that you are carrying
yourself poorly, take the mental attitude of
standing straight, as well as the physical
one. Look at the men you meet and imagine
that each one of them owes you a dollar.
Put even a suggestion of arrogance into
your position. Hold your head well back;
look people squarely in the face. This will
not only give the impression to others that
you possess the power you want, but it will

46 The Efficient Life

actually tend to bring that power to
you.

Flat chest, flabby muscles, jelly-like abdo-
men do not make for what we call a strong
personality.

Keep the neck against the collar.

EXERCISE-ITS USE AND
ABUSE

CHAPTER VI

"^rOT one man in a thousand has time to
•^ ^ keep himself in the best possible
physical condition. To do so would con-
sume the largest part of his waking day.
People who write books on hygiene have a
way of overlooking this.

One book I have seen recommends that
the teeth should be carefully brushed after
each meal, the crevices cleaned out with
dental thread, the mouth swabbed out with
absorbent cotton and rinsed with an anti-
septic wash. This process, it also adds,
should be gone through with before retiring
and on rising.

There is too much to do on other lines to
permit the attainment of perfection in any
one. What we want is that degree of culti-
vation that will enable us to live and work
most intensely. We cannot spend our whole
time oiling and cleaning the machine.

It is eflficiency we aim at, not perfection.

We want to find a practical middle
ground, somehow, where we can get the
4?

50 The Efficient Life

largest returns with the least sacrifice.
Sacrifices have to be made somewhere, in
any case. We have to let some things go
on in a world of hard facts. How are we
to decide which?

In the matter of exercise, the question for
us is not: How much exercise will bring
good results ? That is a theoretical, not
a practical, consideration. The real ques-
tion is: How much exercise is it worth
while for a man to take if he wants to keep
on the top level of efficiency.^

It is certain that a man cannot think and
act energetically unless his nerves and
muscles are in good working order. Muscles
that are never used get flabby and soft;
they become incapable of obeying the will
promptly and effectively. The effects on
the nerves that control them are equally
bad. They lose their power of responding
vividly. They cannot be relied upon to do
expert work.

President G. Stanley Hall of Clark Uni-
versity calls the flabby muscle the chasm
between willing and doing.

Enough exercise, then, to keep the muscles

Exercise — Its Use and Abuse 51

of the body firm and sensitive is what we
must aim at. For a man whose chief busi-
ness in hfe is headwork, there is Httle to be
gained in building up muscular tissue beyond
that point. He may do it for recreation if
he likes; but that is a different matter.

Many of us come to dislike the thought of
exercise. The very word suggests con-
scientious and disagreeable quarter-hours
spent with dumb-bells or pulley weights in
the solitude of one's apartment, or, worse yet,
on the floor of a gymnasium.

There is little use in recommending an
elaborate system of home gymnastics. That
would be easy to do. Hundreds of them
have been recently put on the market.
People often take them up with religious
enthusiasm and get splendid results out of
them — for a time. But I have known few
who kept it up long. That does not mean
that the exercise system was at fault. It
simply means that it was not calculated to
hold the interest. A man's enthusiasm for
dumb-bell gymnastics is almost sure to
wane after a while. There is nothing to
keep him at it excepting will power and

52 The Efficient Life

conscience, and they cannot bear the
strain forever.

Therefore, I do not propose an elaborate
system of private gymnastics. If a man
forces himself to carry on exercise simply
because he thinks it is his duty, more than
half its benefits are lost. For a really
valuable exercise is one which reaches
beyond the muscles and the digestive organs ;
it braces up and stimulates the mind.

When a man is being bored to death, he is
not deriving the most benefit from his
occupation, even though that occupation
may be a strenuous half- hour of chest
weights.

The kind of exercise that hits the mark is
the kind a man likes for its own sake; and
the kind a man likes for its own sake has
something of the play-spirit in it — the life
and go of a good game. It will give a chance
for some rivalry, a definite goal to aim at,
a point to win — something, in other words,
to enlist his interest and arouse his enthu-
siasm.

You cannot look at such exercise merely
for its effects on the neuro-muscular ap-

Exercise— Its Use and Abuse 53

paratus. It reaches the man's very self.
Its psychological value is as important as
its physiological.

The good a man gets out of a brisk horse-
back ride in the park is something more than
what comes simply from the activity of his
muscular system, or from the effect of the
constant jolting upon the digestive organs.
There is the stimulus to the whole system
that comes from his filling his lungs with
fresh, out-of-door air. There is the exhil-
aration of sunshine and blue sky, and of the
wind on the skin. There is the excitement
of controlling a restive animal. All this
makes the phenomenon a complex one,
something much larger than the mere term
"exercise" would imply.

A man could sit on a mechanical horse in
a gymnasium and be jolted all day without
getting any of these larger effects.

The best forms of exercise will call the
big muscles of the body into play, the
muscles that do the work. This gives bulk
effects. It reaches the whole system. Playing
scales on the piano, though exhausting to one's
self and others, does not belong to this class.

54 The Efficient Life

Exercise should not be too severe. Many
ambitious people injure themselves through
trying to accomplish too much along this
line. Where the mind is already tired, the
body can only lose by violent exertion, even if
it is only for a few moments. Exercise breaks
down tissue, exhausts nerve energy. If any
good is to be gained from it, this body waste
must be repaired. But when the system
is already exhausted, it cannot afford an
additional expenditure. A city man with a
conscience is in danger of making too hard
work of his exercise when he takes it at all.

Tennis is a game that nervous, excitable,
overworked people like to play. They
ought to avoid it. It works them too hard
and too fast. Instead of resting them, it
wears them out.

There is no better outdoor exercise for a
city man than a game of golf. The alternate
activity and rest that it provides for, the
deep breathing caused by the necessary hill-
climbing, the sociability of the game — all
these are admirable features. Rowing,
paddling, bowling, tramping — any form
of recreation that brings a variety of

Exercise— Its Use and Abuse 55

physical exertion and that appeals to a man's
interest and enthusiasm — belong in the class
of **A 1" exercises.

The fact remains, however, that a busy
man cannot go riding in the park every day,
nor spend an hour and a half on the golf
links, desirable as this may be. He ought
to have that kind of recreation — he must get
it at intervals — but as a daily habit it is out
of the question. From Monday morning to
Saturday noon he needs to economise every
minute. He wants to know what the
minimum amount of time is that he can
give to exercise, and still keep on the safe
side of the danger line.

There are many people who keep well
and who do their work successfully without
ever taking any formal exercise at all. A
man who looks out intelligently for the
character of his food, who eats properly,
attends to the demands of his bowels, keeps
his skin in good order and provides him-
self with a decent amount of mental relaxa-
tion— ^such a man can often go for a long
time without any special exercise.

But a man who eats big dinners must get

56 The EfScient Life

exercise. So must a man who works in a
badly ventilated room. So must a man
who has a tendency to worry, or to consti-
pation, or to headache. Indeed the number
is very small of those who escape the need.

It is true, however, that in most cases two
minutes of vigorous exercise a day would
serve the merely muscular purposes. This
is enough to keep the muscles reasonably
hard and to keep the functions of the system
in good working shape. It will have a bigger
effect, to be sure, on the feelings than on the
muscles, but the muscles will get what is
imperative.

The average city business man without
any physical impediment to fight against,
can probably get along successfully on such
an exercise schedule as the following :

(1) Five minutes each day of purely
muscular exercise, such as can be taken
perfectly well in one's room without any
special apparatus. Five minutes a day
does not put a great tax on one's conscience.
There is every possibility of a man's being
able to keep it up. This is to keep external
muscles in trim.

Exercise— Its Use and Abuse 57

(2) Short intervals during the day of
fresh air, brisk walking, deep breathing.
This can all be secured in the regular order
of the day's business. A man can easily
spend as much as half an hour walking out
of doors every day. This is for heart, lungs,
and digestion.

(3) The reservation of at least one day a
week for rest and recreation, for being out
of doors, for playing games, etc. This is
an essential. This is for both body and
mind. A man who thinks he can get along
without at least one vacation time a week
simply proves his ignorance. He ruins his
chances of doing really efficient work; for
the mind cannot concern itself all the time
with a single subject and still keep any
freshness, spontaneity, or initiative. Such
a man makes a mere machine of himself.
He is sacrificing his personality and all that
it might count for.

MEAT, DRINK, AND THE
TABLE

CHAPTER VII

TITUNGER is an instinct, and an instinct
is the log-book of thousands of genera-
tions before us — the record of their experi-
ences. Hence it has some authority. It is
more likely to be right than the latest health
food advertisement.

But there are cases in which we cannot
trust to our instincts without danger. The
fact that an instinct has come down to us
from prehistoric times, when men lived
differently from ourselves, makes its direc-
tions occasionally out of date. It has not
adapted itself to any of the special conditions
of modern civilisation. It sticks in the
old rut and calls as strongly as ever for satis-
faction ; but it does not speak with the same
authority. Our present needs may demand
something quite different.

Take the case of the average child and
the sugar supply. There is no doubt but that
he is too fond of it. His appetite is a very
bad guide in that particular matter. But
the explanation is simple enough. Remember

62 The Efficient Life

the high value of sugar as an energy producer.
Remember, too, how rarely in nature it
occurs in the simple form. For our aboriginal
ancestors sugar was a hard commodity to
get; fruits and honey were about the only
sources of supply. Yet their bodies needed
it. Consequently, a strong, instinctive crav-
ing for it was developed in them — strong
enough to make them ready to surmount ob-
stacles and face danger in its pursuit.

Conditions have altered since then. We
are now furnished with a practically unlimited
supply — enormously beyond what we actu-
ally need. Yet the instinct remains, still
loyal to the old rut. All of this throws light
upon the familiar triple phenomenon of
child, jam-cupboard, doctor.

Perhaps the most important changes of
all, so far as the body is concerned, have
come in the matter of our daily occupation
— the way we get our living. The ' ' natural"
way is the primitive way: hunting, climb-
ing, diving — forms of vigorous bodily activ-
ity. The body was intended to carry on a
large amount of physical work, to be con-
stantly exerting intense muscular effort,

Meat, Drink, and the Table 63

We do not live that way now. The con-
ditions of our industrial civilisation have
put an end to it. Machinery does most of
our heavy work for us. We live by our
brains. We walk a few miles a day and
sit in chairs the rest of the time.

But this has not had much effect upon the
character of our appetite. We are often
hungry for the kind of food that would only
suit a body under constant exercise. There
are those among us, too, who are inclined
to eat more than is good for them — to be
candid — who like to stuff themselves. Now
stuffing was a normal habit to our ances-
tors. They had to take their food when
they could get it and trust God for the next
meal. And it was easy for them to steal
away into some quiet retreat and sleep un-
disturbed until the stomach had done the
main part of its duty. The digestive organs,
accustomed to coarse work and violent
exercise, were able to cope with the situation.
Ours are not. Fine head-work and coarse
stomach-work do not go naturally together.
Here again we meet with a special problem.

Much scientific effort has been expended

64 The Efficient Life

of late to discover experimentally what kinds
of food are best adapted to modern con-
ditions. The results of these experiments
are certainly interesting and suggestive; but
whether or not they have proved all that is
maintained for them is open to question.

One thing, however, they have made
perfectly clear, and that is that the majority
of us eat a much larger quantity of meat than
we need — more, indeed, than we can get
any possible good from. Meat twice a day
is enough for anybody, and for most of us
once a day would be better yet. There
is no doubt, too, that such foods as grains,
nuts, fruits, vegetables, should take a much
more prominent place in our diet than they
do. Beyond that, it would be dangerous to
preach as yet.

No man knows exactly what kind of food
or how much food another man needs un-
less he is personally well informed about
his case — and he may not know even then.
A man's own particular make-up is the
prime factor in deciding questions of meat
and drink. But there are several ways in
V^hich one can tell pretty accurately whether

Meat, Drink, and the Table 65

he is getting the most out of his food or not.
The first of these is through keeping track
of his weight. Everybody ought to know
what his own normal weight is — the weight
at which he accomplishes the most and feels
the best. The averages given in a life
insurance table will serve in a rough way,
but not so well as a table of one's own
variations. It often happens that the opti-
mum weight for a particular individual
differs considerably from the general aver-
age.

By keeping track of the weight from week
to week and comparing it with the standard,
every alteration of the general bodily con-
dition can be discovered and attended to.
The time will come when every up-to-date
bathroom will be equipped with its pair of
scales.

Another way of discovering a defective
condition of the digestive organs is to thump
the pit of the stomach with the finger. If
it makes you wince and double up, it shows
that something is wrong.

The presence of gas in the stomach is
also a sign of faulty digestion. It means

66 The Efficient Life

that there is fermentation going on, that the
process of breaking down and assimilating
the foods is imperfect.

Something, too, is indicated by one's
state of mind. If you have a feeling of
depression and low spirits without any ap-
parent cause, it is time to inquire into the
food supply and what the body is doing
with it.

A good digestion is a thing to take pride in.
It ought to be cherished most conscien-
tiously. The trouble with many of us is
that just so long as we are not disturbed by
what goes on in our alimentary tract, we
abuse it outrageously. There will be a
price to pay for this some time. The worm
turns; and so does the stomach.

There are a few plain facts about how
and when to eat which it would be worth a
man's while to keep in mind, no matter how
well he may feel.

If you are in a hurry, eat lightly. There
is no virtue in gulping down a large meal just
because it is meal-time. While the mind is
actively engaged in the details and responsi-
bilities of business, the digestive apparatus

Meat, Drink, and the Table 67

is in no condition to undertake heavy work.
The blood supply is drained off elsewhere,
giving all the contribution it can to the
brain; and if a quantity of food is taken
in, it simply remains undigested in the
stomach.

Worry, hurry, unsettled mind, low spirits,
all tend to delay or to stop the activities of
the alimentary canal.

This has been neatly shown by an X-ray
experiment upon the digestion of a cat. A
certain amount of subnitrate of bismuth
was introduced into its stomach before
feeding. This substance is impervious to
the X-rays, but is harmless to the organism.
Hence it was possible to watch the action
of the stomach while the digestion of food
went on there. As long as the animal was
kept nervous and excited, all the movements
necessary to digestion were stopped.

Students who go at hard head-work
immediately after meals often suffer from
indigestion. So do letter carriers and other
people whose meals are followed by pro-
longed physical exertion. Indeed, any kind
of effort which forces the blood-flow away

68 The Efficient Life

from the alimentary region is injurious after
heavy eating.

On this account it is worth a very special
effort on the part of every man to compass
one meal each day which shall be leisurely,
uninterrupted, and cheerful. The argu-
ments for this are not based on digestion
only; they have to do with the mental health
of the individual, and with the welfare of the
family as an institution.

The dinner table is the centre of the family
life, and the family is the social unit. The
common meal draws all its members
together under informal and familiar con-
ditions, where mutual interests and com-
panionship are especially promoted. Even
if a man has no home of his own, it is his
business to make himself a member of some
household and to have a share in its life.

An energetic effort to leave one's work and
responsibility behind, in the office or at the
counter, a leisurely bath and a change of
clothes, the deliberate resolution to be agree-
able and to make the meal a pleasure for all
concerned, even though it costs an effort —
this is not only good for the digestion and

Meat, Drink, and the Table 69

the whole state of the body, but it also
serves a social purpose of the greatest
importance.

It is the fashion in some quarters to sniff
at the pleasures of the table as if they were
essentially of a rather inferior character.
Perhaps they do not belong in the loftiest
rank, but they are perfectly normal, and
more than that, they afford a natural med-
ium for the real interchange of ideas — ^for
real reciprocity. One cannot afford to
neglect this fact.

The after-dinner state of mind exists only
after dinner.

THE BUSINESS OP
DIGESTION

CHAPTER Vill

OpHE body is like a stove. If you put the
^ wrong kind of fuel into a stove, you
cannot get good results out of it. A hard-
coal stove will not get along well on soft
coal. It will suffer from indigestion. It
must be thoroughly cleaned out, too, at
certain times, or its works get clogged and
there is trouble of another sort. Right
coaling and right cleaning — those are im-
portant considerations if the stove is to
carry on its legitimate business.

No man can be useful or eflScient in the
world without proper food and without
giving attention to the disposal of waste.
Nearly all the diseases and most of the pains
people have are related, first or last, to dis-
turbances of nutrition.

It pays a man to know something about
the way his stove works and how to give it
the best chance.

As for coaling, then — ^What and how
ought a man to eat.? The first important
problem here has to do with the mouth and

74 The Efficient Life

its work — with mastication. No one has
ever made a hard-and-fast rule for that
which is of any practical value. If food is
not chewed enough, there is a bad time due.
If it is chewed too much, there is waste:
patience and energy are thrown away. So
much is obvious.

Now the purpose of mastication is two-
fold; first, to break up the food so that the
digestive juices can get at it readily; and sec-
ondly, to mix it with the saliva of the mouth.

Food that is bolted is likely to ferment in
the stomach before the gastric fluids can
work their way into it. Food that is not
well mixed with saliva is hard to digest, for
saliva is an alkaline substance and stimulates
the flow of the acid stomach juices. It is
intended to help them in the despatch of
their work.

Many people get into the habit of dosing
themselves with a "digestive" or some other
kind of medicine in order to stimulate the
secretion of the gastric juice. This is a
dangerous habit. If the same effect can be
obtained through natural means, it is better
from every point of view. The natural

The Business of Digestion 75

remedy for faulty digestion is often simply
to chew the food more slowly.

This increases the amount of saliva that
mixes with it. This is not a picturesque nor
exciting method of treatment, perhaps, but
it often brings the right results.

Eating a dry cracker twenty minutes
before meals may be still more eflScacious.
No water should be taken with it and the
cracker should be thoroughly chewed.
The saliva that gets into the stomach by this
means starts the gastric juices flowing, and
by the time the meal itself arrives, the
stomach is able to cope with it.

Nobody has escaped being informed by
some earnest friend that it is injurious to
take water with meals. The *' Health
Hints" of the average newspaper are fertile
with this sort of advice. There is really a
sound reason at the basis of it, but it is
carried too far. The trouble with the
majority of people is that they drink water
simply to wash down their solid food.
This is a thoroughly bad habit. It cuts off
the secretion of saliva; the stomach juices
lack their normal stimulus.

y6 The Efficient Life

Further than this, if the water is cold it
puts a temporary injunction on the work of
the ahmentary canal. The stomach is
unable to carry on business again until the
regulation temperature has been restored.
And this takes time.

The moderate use of water or other liquids
at meals does no harm, if a man takes them
not as a wash but as a drink.

There are plenty of other causes for
indigestion besides slipshod mastication.
A faulty circulation of blood through the
abdomen is one. This may be due to
interference either from within or from
without.

Tight clothes are the commonest form of
outside interference. Not only is the blood
circulation hurt by them, but the free action
of the great diaphragm muscle beneath the
lungs, one of whose duties is to keep the walls
of the stomach kneading and churning the
food contents, is hampered. Military coats,
stays, tight belts — anything that really binds
the body — are sure to be harmful.

It is hard to get people, particularly
women, to admit that their clothes are too

The Business of Digestion 77

tight. A pressure mark left on the skin
after undressing is an infallible sign.

Internal interference with the circulation
is most often due to some trouble with the
liver. Anything which stops the free flow
of blood through this organ dams it back
into the region of the stomach and produces
congestion there. A bad liver circulation
frequently comes from the use of liquors,
particularly from drinking on an empty
stomach. If a man is going to drink liquor
at all he should do so only when he eats.
The evil effects and the morbid appetite
developed by drinking occur largely in
connection with indulgence between meals.

In a great many cases the cause of diges-
tive troubles is to be found in a bad carriage
of the body: neck forward, ribs depressed,
abdomen protuberant — what has been termed
the "gorilla" position. This allows a slight
displacement of all the important organs of
the abdominal cavity; and such a displace-
ment, along with the reduced power of the
heart and diaphragm, may work great harm.
The matter of right carriage has already
been discussed. The first step in getting

78 The Efficient Life

the digestion into better shape is often the
correction of this easy but villainous habit
of bad posture.

Another great aid is deep breathing.
After breakfast and after luncheon, as you
are walking on the street, breathe just as
deeply as you can ten times in succession.
Then breathe normally for a minute. Then
take ten more deep breaths. Do this four
or five times the first day and increase it by
one round every day until you are taking
from three to four hundred deep breaths
daily as a regular habit. This consumes
no time. You do it while you are walking
on the street. It improves the action of
the diaphragm. It stimulates the circula-
tion of the blood in the head. It increases
the activity of the intestinal movements. It
costs no money.

Right there, perhaps, lies the chief diffi-
culty with it. If each breath cost a man a
cent, a great many more men would culti-
vate the habit.

Most of us take but little exercise. We
sit in chairs and work with our heads.
Nature intended our bodies to do muscular

The Business of Digestion 79

work. When she did that job, she did not
look ahead to the complex and artificial
conditions of modern city life. But it is
clear that one of the best methods we have
of raising the efficiency of the bodily func-
tions is exercise. It is especially helpful to
imperfect digestion.

If a man will go to a gymnasium, or swim,
or bowl, or box, or play golf, or do anything
else that involves a good deal of exertion
for the big muscles of the body, the whole
system will respond energetically. The di-
gestive organs will be among the first to
feel the effect of the new life.

But we must make a clear distinction
between what is called ''general exercise'*
and other forms. A man can work his hand
or his throat or the muscles of his face most
conscientiously without getting any benefit
so far as his general health is concerned.
The value of exercise is in proportion to the
total amount of work done. The larger the
muscles, the more work they can do. It is
chiefly through using the muscles of the legs
and trunk that results for the system as a
whole may be secured.

8o The Efficient Life

Take big movements of the big muscles.

Swinging a pair of light Indian clubs may
be interesting and pretty, but it does not
have much to do with the health. Twisting
the trunk from side to side, bending forward
the back, are types of exercise that bring
results. The majority of popular sports
call for such movements as these. It is the
big movements that count,

WASTE

CHAPTER IX

TNDIGESTION, nervous exhaustion,
constipation — three of Nature's star
plays when she makes up her mind to get
quits with you. You cannot cheat her
either. She plays the game for all it is
worth.

Constipation is ten times more prevalent
than are nervous disorders. I believe that
more of the chronically sick are so because of
this than for any other reason. It is
peculiarly the penalty of city life, the price
we pay for living under artificial conditions.

Any number of special causes may lie
at the root of constipation, but the com-
monest is certainly physical inactivity — the
life of the ojQSce chair and the rapid
transit. The digestive organs were not
planned with that in view. They are not
self-sufficient. They need to be helped
along in their work by the rest of the body.

Vigorous physical exertion stimulates
them. The jar of hard walking or running,
the stretch and twist of climbing, and swim-

84 The Efficient Life

ming and heavy muscular work — all these
serve to keep the digestive tract in constant
activity. In the daily programme of most of
us there is nothing to supply this need.
Therefore the passage of food through the in-
testines tends to grow sluggish, and the colon
and rectum are in danger of getting clogged.

That is one cause for constipation. An-
other lies in the kind of food we eat. We
take so much trouble nowadays to have it
nourishing, digestible and perfectly prepared
that we often fail to give the stomach and
intestines enough work to do. There is not
enough bulk in the food. The walls of the
intestines cannot get a good grip on it.

Food that is ''predigested" is worse yet
for a healthy man. It leaves practically no
responsibility for the alimentary tract; and
the alimentary tract needs responsibility if
it is to keep in order. Idleness leads
directly to incompetency. The system for-
gets how to take care of a square meal.
"Concentrated" foods are worst of all.
Eat mince pie, sauerkraut, and rarebit occa-
sionally if you will, but give a wide berth to
the steady use of concentrated foods. They

Waste 85

have a place in the world, but it is not that
of a regular diet.

The trouble with most of the health-foods,
whose boom days seem to be just passing
the meridian, is that they are found wanting
in two important respects. They have not
enough bulk, and they lack grit; that is,
there is nothing in them to irritate and
stimulate the intestine- walls. The intes-
tines need stimulation from within as well
as from without. The reason why figs,
raisins, bran-crackers, are good for con-
stipation is because they provide just this.

I know two university students who tried
the experiment of making their whole diet
consist of predigested foods. They were
preparing for final examinations and wished
to secure the maximum nourishment with
the least expenditure of nervous force. The
experiment was decidedly successful, except
for the fact that after the six weeks of in-
tense labour their digestive organs were in
such a state of inefficiency from prolonged
lack of use that it took them months to get
back to normal working conditions.

Then there is the practice of using laxa-

86 The Efficient Life

tives. It lies back of thousands of chronic
cases of constipation. A man who uses a
laxative to help him out of an inconvenience
is not hitting at the root of the difficulty at
all. The conditions that gave rise to it
probably remain, and they will make trouble
again. In a little while the system gets to
rely on the laxative; then the habit becomes
a necessity. The doses have to be made
larger and larger, while their effects become
less and less all the time.

No laxative — not even an enema — ^will
work permanently. They go round in a
vicious circle. They all leave their victim
worse off than when he began. They
make his trouble chronic. They never
touch the real cause.

One man out of every ten is said to be a
slave of the laxative habit.

Another sure method of achieving con-
stipation is that of delaying to answer the
calls of the system when they come. It is
not perfectly easy, perhaps, to attend to the
matter when the first messages from the
rectum arrive. It is easier to put it off. It
continues to be easier.

Waste 87

But after a while the nerves get tired of
their ineffectual efforts and cease to prod
the brain any longer. Consequently, when
a convenient opportunity finally comes,
there is nothing to remind one of the need.
A delay habit like this leads to the most
serious kinds of results. If a man kept a
regular time each day for attending to the
business of disposing of the waste-products
of his body, the system would soon adjust
itself and be ready to respond at the right
moment. Regularity in this matter is essen-
tial to healthy living.

Often enough, though, the root of the
difficulty lies not so much in bad habits of
the body as in bad habits of mind. The
way in which a man looks at himself and at
the world has a lot to do with what goes on
in his digestive tract. No part of the body
except the muscular system is so much
affected by states of mind as the digestive
and excretory organs. Worry and nervous-
ness wreck digestion. Discouragement and
low spirits lead the straight road to
constipation.

A man's mind may be constipated before

88 The Efficient Life

his body. Melancholy tends toward con-
stipation and constipation tends toward
melancholy. It is a merry-go-round draped
in black.

Most people have the idea that con-
stipation means infrequency of bowel move-
ment. That is merely a symptom. Many
men suffer from constipation who have
passages with perfect regularity. Constipa-
tion is the condition which results from
incomplete passages. It is due to the
presence of waste-products in the alimentary
canal. If there is a constant remainder
there, the body keeps absorbing some of the
poisons of decay from it and dumping them
into the circulation. The system is poison-
ing itself, slowly but surely. All the symp-
toms show this.

A sense of fulness and pressure in the
abdomen is one of them. The presence
of gas — a fermentation sign — is another.
There is likely to be a persistent, nagging
headache — the kind that cannot be shaken
off. The breath is bad, and a man feels
in chronic low spirits, down in the mouth.
There is a definite lessening of mental

Waste 89

power; the mind works at slug-pace and
without any of its habitual energy. It takes
a big effort to set one's self at work and to
accomplish things. Besides this, the com-
plexion is likely to be poor, the skin muddy
and unhealthy looking. These symptoms
are all due to the same cause: a body
saturated with waste product, with poisons,
which ought to have been gotten rid of. It
is a villainous condition.

But there is no need of its being per-
manent.

THE ATTACK ON CONSTI-
PATION

CHAPTER X

npHE first step in the cure of constipation
is to get into the right frame of mind.
That may be easier said than done. Never-
theless, a cheerful and optimistic temper is
the most efficacious of all remedies. "Be-
lieve and thou shalt be saved."

The digestive tract is remarkably sus-
ceptible to faith. People who suffer from
constipation are often remarkably destitute
of it. They prefer to believe the worst
about themselves. They even seem to get
a morbid satisfaction out of it. No matter
how encouraging has been the outcome in
other cases, they are sure there is no hope
for themselves; that they are incurable.

An energetic conviction that the trouble
can and will be cured counts tremendously
in curing it. That is why Christian Science
and other forms of mental healing often work
such admirable results when applied to
chronic digestion troubles.

The difficulty lies in the fact that a man
cannot always control his mental attitude

94 The Efficient Life

simply by setting out to do so. He can say
over to himself, *'I will be optimistic,'*
several hundred times a day and yet remain
most sad. He needs specific things to do;
he needs to get at his problem in a concrete
way.

There are a few purely practical sugges-
tions that ought to fit in at this juncture.
I have known a great number of people who
have found help in taking a glass of cold
water both upon rising and upon retiring.
The simplicity of this treatment is its only
fault.

If you have been paying very conscientious
attention to your diet in the hope of knock-
ing out the trouble that way — worry less and
eat more. Stop thinking about it. Give
your conscience a vacation. Your char-
acter will not suffer.

See to it that there is bulk in your food,
something for your intestines really to get
hold of and work on. Food which contains
cellulose or other mechanically irritating
substances is excellent. Bran biscuits at
night are often useful in this way.

Exercise, again, is a most important forni

The Attack on Constipation 95

of treatment. The reason is the same as
in other cases; it is an attempt to get back
some of those conditions under which the
body developed its functions.

Many of the forms of exercise prescribed
for the cure of constipation are more drama-
tic than practical — not because they would
not help if followed, but because no one will
follow them. To this class belongs the
following: Lie flat on the back in bed and
work the head of a sixteen pound iron ball
along the course of the colon, the walls of
the abdomen to be completely relaxed, the
movement to be made slowly, and a cheerful
temper to be preserved throughout. The-
oretically excellent.

Far more practical is a ride upon a hard
trotting horse. This is effective because
the continuous jarring of the body helps
along the work of the intestinal walls. The
easier the horse, the less his therapeutic
value.

Rapid walking is commonly one of the
effective means. This gives the same jar-
ring motion to the abdomen. If the speed
is as great as possible, there is a slight

96 The Efficient Life

twisting of the hips with each step which
keeps the abdominal organs in constant
motion. And since fast walking is a form
of energetic exercise, calling into play-
large groups of muscles in rapid alternation,
it greatly increases the movement of the
diaphragm. We have already spoken of
the important part played by the diaphragm
in the work of the digestive tract.

Running, deep breathing, twisting and
bending of the trunk, and the majority of
general gymnasium exercises, are all among
the normal remedies.

Such suggestions as these do not strike
as deeply as the mental attitude, but they
represent the concrete side of the proposi-
tion. They are practical. They give a
handle to get hold of — something that a
man can set himself doing; and if he goes
at it in earnest and with the intention of
playing the game for all it is worth, the
right mental attitude is pretty sure to come
too.

I remember most vividly a case that
came under my direction a few years ago. It
was a professional man of middle age^

The Attack on Constipation 97

conscientious, a hard worker, very much
in earnest. It was easiest for him to look
on the dark side of things, and he worried
constantly about his own physical condition
— which, for that matter, was in a pretty bad
way. Heredity, he believed, was the source
of his trouble; and having found this explan-
ation he was convinced that nothing could be
done for him, that his case was hopeless.

He listened indulgently to stories about
other people who had been cured; but he
was chiefly interested in telling about him-
self— the harsh measures he had submitted
to; the enormous drug doses he had taken
— all in vain. This he related with a sort
of martyr pride. It was evident that the
role of victim was not without its com-
pensations.

The first advice he got was to take deep
breathing exercises, lying on the floor of his
bedroom. He had to take these in a
leisurely manner, with intervals between
each round of five deep breaths; and it was
not until later that arm and leg movements
w^ere added. Any heavy exercise brought
on dizziness.

98 The Efficient Life

Twice a week he took a ride on a hard
trotting horse. Then I set him to running,
first a few yards at a jog pace and then an
interval of walking, then a Httle more run-
ning. I used to watch him sometimes
through a hole in the fence as he conscien-
tiously went the rounds of the track, and I
shall never forget the expression on his face.
He wanted to be bored, but he knew that
would be WTong — contrary to directions.
So he bravely jogged along and succeeded
in taking it something in the spirit in which
a man takes a bad joke that he knows he is
expected to laugh at.

Much the hardest thing to get at in that
case was the mental condition. I knew
that he could not be cured until that was
changed somehow. Finally I directed him
to tell a funny story at each meal of the day,
with an extra two at dinner. That was
because it was entirely impossible for him
to control his own state of mind by will-
power. He needed a handle — some objec-
tive way of getting at it. He rebelled
violently at the new orders, but finally con-
sented to make the attempt.

The Attack on Constipation 99

It was such a terrible undertaking for him
that for the first few days he could not open
his mouth. He forgot his stories completely.
Then I made him write them down on a
piece of paper and keep them in his lap
for reference. When a pause in the con-
versation arrived he would become restless,
look anxiously about, glance at his lap,
summon up his courage, clear his throat and
begin. The prescription was a bitter one
for him; but he had promised to make the
attempt, and before a week was out, the
humour of the situation struck him, and he
began to enjoy the fun. After that his
recovery was sure.

Before six weeks had passed there had
taken place such a change in his character
that all his acquaintances noticed it. He
had been suffering from constipation for
years. He grew cheerful, light-hearted and
approachable. The whole current of his
life had turned in a different direction.

From a case like that much may be
learned.

FATIGUE

CHAPTER XI

npHAT great Italian physiologist, Angelo
Mosso, has given an account in his
book on "Fatigue" of the arrival of flocks
of quails on the seacoast of Italy on their
northward migration from Africa. The
distance across the Mediterranean is three
hundred miles or more, and the bird covers
this distance in less than nine hours, flying
at the rate of eighteen or nineteen yards
per second.

When the quail sights land its strength is
almost exhausted. It seems to have lost the
power of recognising objects, even though
its eyes are wide open. Every year vast
numbers of birds dash themselves to death
against trees, telegraph poles, and houses
on the shore.

Those that have met with no accident lie
motionless on the edge of the beach for
some moments as though stunned. They
seem to have become incapable of fear, and
sometimes even let themselves be caught by
hand without trying to get away. When

103

I04 The Efficient Life

they finally awaken to their exposed position,
they pick themselves up suddenly and run
for a hiding place. But they do not fly.
It is days before they will use their wings
again.

We can see effects of a somewhat similar
kind in ourselves when we are exhausted.
I remember a certain ten-mile bicycle race
in which I was a contestant. I had
fastened my watch to the handle bars in
such a way that I could keep my eyes on it
during the race. Before I had finished the
fifth mile, I found that it was impossible for
me to read the watch-hands. I saw them
plainly enough, and after the race was over
I could recollect how^ they had stood at
certain points in the course; but at the
time I had lost all faculty of getting any
meaning out of them.

An incident of this kind suggests how
deep the effects of fatigue strike in. It is
easy to show by experiment that fatigue
slows down the circulation, dulls the nerves,
lessens the secretion of the glands, decreases
the power of digestion, reduces the ability
of the system to recover from shock or

Fatigue 105

injury, and makes the body peculiarly
liable to disease.

In other words, fatigue lowers all the
faculties of the body. The effects on the
other parts of a man are just as important.
It puts a chasm between seeing and acting;
it makes a break, somehow, between the
messages that come in to the brain from the
outside world and the messages that go out.
It destroys will-power. In every direction
it decreases elSSciency, forcing the personality
down to a lower level.

Fatigue is a destructive agent like sickness
and death. It is a condition which in the
nature of things we cannot avoid; but it is
important for us to know what it is and how
to deal with it if we want to keep out of
costly blunders.

When we are tired out, we are not our-
selves. A part of us has temporarily gone
out of existence. What remains is some-
thing that belongs to a more primitive state
of civilisation.

Our personalities are built up in strata,
one layer added to another. At the bottom
lie the savage virtues and vices of our

lo6 The EfRcient Life

remote ancestors. The code of morals of
cHff-dwellers and hunting tribes still holds
there. At the top lie the higher attainments
of an advanced society — the things that have
taken hundreds of centuries to acquire. In
men, patience is one of these; modesty is
another; chastity, and a fine sense of justice
and personal obligation belong in the list too.

Now when fatigue begins to attack the
personality, it naturally undermines these
latest strata first. When a man is exhausted
he finds it difficult to be patient. That is
not his fault. It is because fatigue has
forced him back a few hundred generations.
His self-control is at a low ebb. The small-
est annoyances are enough to make him
lose his temper.

The same holds true of all the recent
character acquisitions. Many temptations
are more violent and harder to resist when
a man is fatigued. His moral sense is
dulled. He loses the vividness of his dis-
tinctions between right and wrong, honesty
and dishonesty.

We degenerate from the top down. The
last thing acquired is the first lost.

Fatigue 107

Therefore, bodily vigour is a moral agent.
It enables us to live on higher levels, to keep
up to the top of our achievement. We can
not afford to lose grip on ourselves.

The only thing to do with fatigue, then,
is to get rid of it as soon as possible. As
long as it is with us we ought to realise that
we are not our normal selves and to act in
accordance. Important questions must not
be decided then. It is a bad time to make
plans for the future. A man has lost his
faculty of seeing straight.

It is often said that the best way of getting
rid of fatigue is a change of occupation.
This is usually true, but not always. A
moderate degree of muscular fatigue will
not keep a man from taking up something
which will use his brain; and while his
brain works, his muscles will rest. But
there is a degree of muscular fatigue which
makes head-work impossible.

The converse of this is also true. If a
man's brain is used up, hard exercise is
nothing but a sheer drain upon the system,
not in any sense a form of rest. The central
battery has run down. The energy supply

io8 The Efficient Life

is exhausted. To force anything more out
of it is to kill the goose that laid the golden

eggs.

Unfortunately, a good many men have
the conviction that they must keep exerting
themselves all the time. They call every
moment wasted which is not spent in
activity of some kind, either physical or
mental. Such men are taking the quickest
means to burn themselves out. You cannot
live well and keep happy under a constant
and tyrannical sense of effort. There must
be times of play, times to let up the tension,
and to do easy and natural things which
do not require conscious and exact attention.

Horace Bushnell, the great Connecticut
minister, recognised this when he said,
"Let's go sin awhile." Sinning has the
advantage of being easy, and there are times
when the easy thing is the right thing. A
man who takes no time off for one kind of
play or another, but who keeps the anxious,
conscientious look on his face day in and
day out, may be on the road to heaven, but
he will find that the sanitarium is a way-
station.

Fatigue 109

Each man has his own special manner of
reacting under fatigue — ^what physiologists
call his "fatigue-curve." One works along
steadily and evenly right through the day
without any alternation in his efficiency
worth recording, except that it shades off
gradually during the last hour or two.
Another man is unusually slow in getting
warmed up to work, but once in action he
maintains a higher level of productivity
than the first man; and he may be able to
hold the pace longer besides. A nervous
man can usually throw himself with great
vigour into his work. He is under way in a
minute and sweeps quickly ahead of all
competitors. But the chances are that his
energy will not hold out long. He taps it
too fast. After two hours, or less, he is
likely to feel jaded and tired. His head
needs a rest before he can put it to work
again.

Each of these types is familiar, and there
are as many variations as there are indi-
viduals. Yet men rarely take this into
consideration when blocking out their day.

It is useless for the nervous, high-strung,

no The Efficient Life

quickly-fatigued man to try to live by the
same programme as his phlegmatic, even-
tempered neighbour. The conditions under
which the two men produce the best results
are not identical. The man who cannot
work at his best until after a long period of
warming up, ought to stick to his job, when
once he has gotten at it, as long as he can
keep up to the high-grade level. That is
the only real economy for him. On the
other hand, the man who accomplishes
most when he works by spurts and takes
intervals of play between times, ought not
to feel that he is doing wrong when he gives
up imitating the steady workman. System
and continuous driving decrease, not in-
crease, his efficiency. Both men can do
high-grade work, but not under the same
conditions.

Every man ought to discover the special
conditions of his own best work and to try
to make such conditions for himself, in so
far as he can. Otherwise there is a waste
somewhere. Nothing is gained and much
is lost through trying to run everybody
through the same mould.

Fatigue III

I have spoken of fatigue as one of the
destructive agents. That does not mean
that there is any harm in being thoroughly
tired at night after the day's work, if only
a man knows how to look out for himself.
Other things being equal, the system will
soon repair the waste, and by another day
the man will be ready for energetic work again.

The time when fatigue becomes a really
dangerous agent of destruction is when a
normal amount of rest does not do away
with it — when it piles up day after day, so
that a man comes from his work tired and
goes to it equally tired. Such fatigue as this
keeps him living on a low level of efficiency.
He never gets up to his own possible best.
This may be because he works too hard,
but it is more likely to be because he does
not know how to look out for himself.

An athlete who is training for the two-
mile run cannot cover the whole course
every day. The physical cost of the exer-
tion is so great that a single night is not
enough to make good the waste. A man
who is training for the fifty-yard dash can
do several heats every day.

112 The Efficient Life

How much rest a man needs depends on
the character of his work and on the per-
sonal make-up of the man himself.

Over-fatigue is fatigue that does not
disappear before the next exertion. Over-
fatigue piles up against the day of wrath.
This must be guarded against.

SLEEP

CHAPTER XII

"^JOT one of the fundamental questions
about sleep has yet been answered.
What really happens when we go to sleep ?
What is it that sleeps ? What is the real
distinction between sleeping and waking?

We know little about the real nature of
this every-day mystery. We have had to
unlearn most of the older orthodox theories,
and we have not yet found adequate ones
of our own to take their place.

We cannot say nowadays that "sleep is
fatigue of consciousness." That is mean-
ingless. You might as well speak of the
fatigue of a brook or of an electric current.
We cannot even say that consciousness
necessarily disappears during sleep. Cer-
tainly the brain does not stop working then.
It is still capable of carrying on all kinds of
complicated processes — even solving math-
emtical problems or composing poems. If
this is unconsciousness, it is an odd variety.
And on yet lower levels it can dream.

But if it is not the brain that sleeps, what

115

ii6 The Efficient Life

is it? Certainly not the body. The body
keeps working incessantly. Its activity is
simply reduced to a somewhat lower level.
The heart beats more slowly, the blood
pressure is lower, breathing is irregular and
less frequent, the muscles are relaxed, the
blood supply to the brain is diminished.
But there is still work being done.

Perhaps we should come nearest the
truth if we said that whatever the Thing
is that goes to sleep and wakes up again, it
is never all asleep nor all awake. It is
more or less both at once.

We could illustrate what we mean by an
upright scale like a barometer-back. When
the indicator is near the top of the scale, the
consciousness is most active, wide awake,
alert to all impressions, able to give attention
without effort. As the marker sinks and
sinks on the scale, we become gradually
less and less aware of our surroundings,
our attention flags, we cannot concentrate
our minds; we are at the mercy of any
ideas that drift into our consciousness.
This is the condition of reverie.

Then comes a point where we fail to get

Sleep 117

sense impressions from the outside world.
The light seems to grow remote; we do not
feel our clothes nor the chair or bed on which
we are resting. Our thoughts become less
connected and more indistinct, and in a
few more minutes we have sunk into the
condition we call sleep. But we have not
crossed any sharp dividing line. We have
dropped there by easy stages. Even now
our brain may keep working indistinctly,
and as the indicator rises on the scale, we
begin to dream and perhaps may even hold
conversations aloud with real people in the
real world.

Sleep, then, is a merely relative condition,
not sharply cut off and separated from wak-
ing life, any more than the ebb-tide on the
seashore is distinct in its nature from the
high-tide. They are different stages in the
same phenomenon.

Looking at the matter in this way clears
up a number of misleading ideas. One of
them is that during waking hours we tear
down and during sleeping hours we build
up. This is true in part. But as a matter
of fact, we are tearing down both day and

ii8 The EfBcient Life

night, and we are always building up. The
work of destruction and the work of repair
go on side by side.

The difference is that we destroy faster
during the day than we can build up. The
spending gets ahead of the income. Where-
as at night, when the activity of the body is
less, when its outgo is cut down, the work
of repair has a chance to get ahead. It is
simply a change of ratio.

We are just beginning to discover how
much really goes on in the mind during
sleep. Sleep is not only the time for
physical growth, but I am inclined to think
that it is equally the time for mental growth
— the time when the personality is formed;
that impressions which have been gained
during the day are worked over now and are
made into a part of the sum total: that new
resolutions which we have taken become
rooted and strengthened then, new ideas
that we have hit upon are digested and given
their place in the memory. It seems to be
a time when the mind sorts over its experi-
ences and casts up accounts.

This is true in a special sense of the

Sleep 119

impressions and impulses that come to us just
as we are on the verge of sleep. This is the
moment of all moments when we are most
susceptible to psychic suggestion. It is
almost like the state of the hypnotic sub-
ject, when every command is put into ex-
ecution. A man who is ambitious for himself
will take advantage of the opportunity this
offers; and when he goes to sleep he will
make sure that the thoughts admitted into
his mind are strong and healthy thoughts —
thoughts of joy, of success and accomplish-
ment.

This is not romance. It is certain fact
that a man can make suggestions to him-
self at this time, and that there will be a
positive effect for good upon the spirit and
efficiency of his life. Character is formed
more during the rest that follows work than
during the work itself.

The benefit a man gets from sleep does
not seem to be in proportion to its length.
Five minutes of sleep in the middle of the
day will often give a most surprising brace-
up to the system. Something happens
then — no one can say just what — but there

120 The Efficient Life

is some readjustment, some new coordina-
tion, which may bring an entirely fresh vim
and push to a man, enabHng him to make
the attack on his work with redoubled vigour.
This, while hard to explain, is a matter of
common experience.

Dr. Morse, the great geographer, had an
original way of taking advantage of a
moment's sleep, and of doing it in such a
manner that he did not lose time from his
work. When the sleepy feeling came over
him as he worked late at his desk, he would
place his wife's darner in one of his hands
and hold it between his knees, resting his
elbow on his knees. Then he would yield
to the impulse and close his eyes. But as
soon as he really fell asleep, his hand would
relax; and the sound of the wooden egg
falling to the floor would waken him.
Strangely enough, the second of sleep that
he had thus secured would be enough to let
him work on for another period with new
energy. Then he would go through the
same process again.

My father had such control of the mech-
anism of sleep that often he would take

Sleep 121

a five minutes' nap just before going upon
the platform to deliver an important ad-
dress. It gave him new strength and new
grip for the effort. How he managed to
do it, he was not able to explain himself.

Not many men, however, can hope to gain
such a degree of control of sleep. For most
of us it is still a difficult thing to get to sleep
after a hard and exhausting day of head-
work. Intellectual excitement fatigues us,
but it does not make us sleepy. Instead,
the more we work our heads the harder it is
for us to sleep. The questions that have
absorbed us during the day have a vicious
way of cropping up in our minds again, do
what we will to drive them out. We are
fatigued through and through, but we are
painfully wide awake.

The problem that this situation presents
has not been satisfactorily solved yet. But
it must be solved sometime, for it is perfectly
clear that civilisation is tending more and
more to make head-work the controlling
factor in life. It is my belief that one of the
next great steps forward will be the gradual
acquisition of sleep control, so that a man

122 The Efficient Life

can take a few minutes' rest whenever he
wants it through the day.

As a general principle, it must be remem-
bered that sleep is a non-strenuous thing.
It must not be approached like an enemy to
be conquered, but as a mistress to be wooed.
One rarely succeeds by direct attack, but
can usually succeed by indirect attack.
Hence a period of leisure and quiet should
with almost everyone precede the direct
attempt to go to sleep. It is only under
rare conditions that it is wise to go to bed
directly from hard work, either physical
or mental. An interval of quiet, of leisurely
doing something without mental tension,
is important. To let down the tension of
the day, to become quiet in body and in
mind, is the first essential step.

One may by several means affect the body
and thus aid in securing sleep. If the head
is hot, cold water applied to the face, to
the back of the neck, or even to the entire
head continuously for a minute or two will
frequently be of a real value. Of still
greater utility is a warm bath. This re-
laxes the entire body. The last part of the

Sleep 123

bath should be taken in water as hot as it
is possible to have it, the person merely
sitting in it. This will dilate all the blood
vessels of the legs and thus tend to leave
less blood in the head. Gentle rubbing of
the skin of the body and of the legs tends to
accomplish the same result. Some people
get manifest advantage from a moderate
outdoor walk; some people profit by taking
twelve, fifteen, or twenty slow bendings of
the legs. Rapid exercise, which materially
increases the working of the heart, tends to
keep one awake.

There is a group of agencies which directs
itself to the mind. I have already spoken
of the need of relaxation. Many people
can read themselves to sleep with some
light novel or magazine. Others — partic-
ularly those who suffer from eye strain,
find themselves wider awake the more they
read, even though the reading is of the
lightest character. Of a similar nature is
the playing of some musical instrument.
This may be effective in keeping other
people awake, but one must estimate things
in terms of comparative value.

124 The Efficient Life

There is a large series of intellectual
"stunts." The utility of these I doubt.
Their supposed efficacy lies in producing
such mental fatigue that sleep comes on
promptly. I refer to such efforts as the
calculating of multiples to as great an extent
as is possible to the individual. This in-
volves, of course, a high degree of concentra-
tion. Another form is to repeat the alphabet
backward until one has so learned it, then
to repeat it beginning with A and next tak-
ing Z, then B and Y, and then so on until this
becomes familiar — constantly seeking some
rearrangement of letters, so that intense
attention is involved. Thus persons have
worked out extensive problems in geometry,
by visualising the figures.

Then again people may be sufficiently
fatigued to go to sleep and they may be
quiet, but their minds will not stop working
over some special problems or worrying
over real or imaginary difficulties. The
time-honoured problem of counting imag-
inary sheep jumping over an imaginary
stone fence is familiar. One must imagine
a large flock of sheep approaching a stone

Sleep 125

wall which has a gap in it. The wall is too
high to jump over and there is only one
selected gap. The gap must be so narrow
that but one sheep can jump at a time.
Then one must count this large flock of
sheep one at a time until sleep supervenes
and comes to the aid of the outraged sheep.
I confess that personal experience with this
particular test and others based upon the
same principle has not been very favourable.
My sheep seemed to be very athletic. They
proceeded to find other places in the wall,
over which they attempted to jump. I
must shoo them back with great diligence
at the same time that I am counting those
that jump — and they never jump regularly
— through the desired gap. My sheep are
also obstreperous. Even after I have a
large number securely over the fence and
have counted them, I cannot then rest
quietly, for these sheep in all their most
earnest stupidity will endeavour to jump
back. In attempting to go to sleep by this
means, after ten or fifteen minutes I have
found myself with rigid muscles and
clenched hands, far wider awake than I wai^

126 The Efficient Life

at the beginning, in my futile endeavour to
control the sheep of my imagination. How-
ever, it works with some people.

The fourth way which people take to
secure sleep is by means of drugs. Certain
drugs act promptly, and no immediate ill
results are to be observed. I know of no
drugs, however, that can be used continu-
ously and that do not result in making the
person dependent upon them, and which do
not directly injure in some way the health
or the stamina of the person taking them.
My own conclusion is that drugs for the
sake of sleep should never be taken except
upon the advice and with the knowledge of
a physician who is acquainted with the
general conditions under which the person
is living. Every normal person ought to be
able to command sleep by means of the
ordinary conditions of good health and work
as already described. When these con-
ditions are beyond the control of the person
he should then take counsel of a physician.

STIMULANTS AND OTHER
WHIPS

CHAPTER XIII

T TNDER the constant pressure of city
^^ life a man is always on the lookout
for short-cuts. He jumps at every possible
chance of getting bigger returns with less
outlay of time. He wants to put in every
minute where it will count. When he takes
time out for sleep, he wants to do it up in
good shape. When he gets in his recreation,
he wants to enjoy himself to the top limit.
No matter what he is doing, he goes into
it for all it is worth.

This is why drugs and stimulants make
such an appeal to the city man. They offer
a short-cut method of getting results. They
seem to give Nature a boost.

A drug will often put us to sleep sooner
than we can get there unaided. If we have
the "blues," we can take a dose out of a
bottle and soon feel happy and energetic
again. With the help of a powder or two,
we can knock out a headache and manage
to keep at our business without any loss of
time. If we have to work extra hours, we

130 The Efficient Life

can keep ourselves awake and up to the
game by the help of a stimulant.

In other words, what drugs and stimulants
seem to promise is increased efficiency with-
out increased cost. If this were really the
case, the use of drugs would be a habit to
encourage. But there is a fallacy.

Speaking physiologically, the purpose of
a drug or a stimulant is to modify some
function. It affects the work of an organ,
but it does not affect its structure — at least,
that is not what it is taken for. It forces an
organ to do work which it could not do of
itself: it alters the output without altering
the machinery — the natural capacity.

When we put ourselves to sleep with a
narcotic we are not teaching our nerves how
to let go of excitement and how to regain
their normal balance. They will not be in
a position to do it any better another time
than they were this time, and the chances
are that we shall have to go to the drug
again for help. When we bring about
effects by artificial, instead of natural, means,
the natural means grow more and more
unreliable. The sensitiveness of the nerves

Stimulants and Other Whips 131

has been dulled by the powder, but the con-
ditions that made the sensitiveness have not
been touched at all. There is no cure in a
drug — simply a temporary easing-up of
the situation.

A great many people do not take the
trouble to think into the matter as far as
that. All they want is to get the immediate
result; and if this can be done through a
drug, they make the venture.

The use of patent powders for headache,
sleeplessness, nervous exhaustion, and sim-
ilar difficulties has enormously increased
within the last few years. Taken in small
doses and at rare intervals, these much-
advertised remedies do not seem to be in-
jurious. But a person who gets into the
w^ay of using them, soon gets out of the
way of sticking to rare intervals.

This is almost inevitable. As long as the
powder will produce the result he wants, he
is really forced to keep on using it; for the
actual cause of the trouble has never been
reached and it keeps making more trouble
for him and demanding attention. But
after the drug has been used long enough for

132 The Efficient Life

the system to become habituated to it, the
effect grows less and less in proportion to
the size of the dose. So the doses have to
be increased.

There is no drug that can be taken into
the system regularly without working harm.
Every drug has a secondary effect as well
as a primary one. The immediate effect is
all a man thinks of when he takes it; but
the secondary effect follows just as
inevitably. It is of an entirely different
nature and it is always bad.

For example, the secondary effect of
most of the coal-tar headache powders is to
reduce the number of red blood corpuscles
whose business it is to carry oxygen to all
parts of the body. It also has a dangerous
effect on the heart, bringing in a sort of
paralysis which makes it incapable of nor-
mal work.

The same sort of double-dealing is illus-
trated by every drug. The primary effect
of opium is to deaden the pain-sense and
to bring on an agreeable feeling of well-
being which leads gradually to sleep. Its
secondary effect is to stop salivary secretions

Stimulants and Other Whips 133

and the functions of other glands, and to
stop peristalsis. The constipation that
comes from opium taking is difficult to cure.

Alcohol, nicotine, chloral, cocaine, and
all the rest have secondary effects of just
as undesirable a character.

To put reliance upon a drug or a stimulant
is evidently to put reliance upon a treacher-
ous ally. Nevertheless, there are times
when a treacherous ally is better than none.
Modern city life sometimes forces a man
into situations of such great strain that he is
in danger of going under. The work that
a fagged horse does when the whip is laid on
is not normal work for the horse; but it is
sometimes necessary. The load may have
to be dragged a few more miles, and there
may be only one way to get it done.

A stimulant is very much like a whip.
What it really does is to increase a man's
energy-spending power. A drug does not
create the energy in the man, any more than
a whip creates the energy in a horse. All
it does is to turn on more current.

When a man sits down on a hornet's nest
he is immediately led to expend an unusual

134 The Efficient Life

amount of energy, but the hornet's nest did
not create the energy. It was stored up
in the man's nerves and muscles. The act
of sitting down in the unaccustomed place
simply enabled the man to spend more
energy in a given space of time than he
otherwise would have done.

Now there is no doubt that one of the
main reasons for our being here in the world
is that we may get things done. We have
work on hand, work which is peculiarly our
own; and whether it succeeds or not depends
altogether on ourselves. There are sure to
be emergencies, periods of special strain,
when everything seems to come to a head
and to need attention at the same time. At
such a crisis as that it is out of the question
for a man to stop and rest. He needs to
keep awake, to keep thinking and planning
hard, hour after hour. Fatigue cannot be
any factor in the situation just now.

Right here stimulants have their place.
They offer a perfectly rational way of bridg-
ing the crisis. They enable a man to keep
tapping his supplies of energy after the
system itself utterly refuses to give up any

Stimulants and Other Whips 135

more. This is abnormal, of com'se; but
city life is abnormal too, and it requires us
to do abnormal things.

But there is one fact which must be kept
absolutely in mind: The stimulant does
not bring any new supply of energy into the
system. There is not one atom of it added.
All it does is to open the conduits wider. It
furnishes nothing except the chance to
spend faster.

This fact has a tremendously practical
bearing. It means that every period of
expenditure under stimulants must be made
good by a corresponding period of rest later.
This is the only possible way of getting back
the equilibrium.

In a long race a man cannot make a spurt
and then expect to take up the regulation
pace right away. He has to go slower for
a while until he has averaged things up
again. A man who boosts himself over a
tough place by the help of stimulants is in
danger of forgetting that he has made a
drain on his energy-supply. He is likely
to jump into his regular work again without
any let-up. To do this leaves him worse

136 The Efficient Life

off every time he takes the stimulant,
for he never really makes good his over-
expenditures. He has kept drawing more
and more upon his capital. Eventually
he reaches the bottom and goes bank-
rupt.

Many cases of this kind have come under
my own observation. I have had men come
to me before some important event like a
big convention in which they had a large
share of responsibility, and ask for some
means to keep themselves going at top
speed during those two or three days.
After a good many years of experience I
have learned that it is never safe to consent
to dose a man up, unless you can get him to
give you his word of honour that he will
give himself a corresponding vacation as
soon as the special strain is over.

Time and time again men come to me
afterward and beg to be let off from their
promise on the ground that they feel so well
that it seems useless to bother with time
off. They want permission to go right back
into regular work. They don't know what
they're talking about — that's all.

Stimulants and Other Whips 137

Excessive expenditure needs to be balanced
by excessive rest.

If a principle like this is understood, a
man has a right to whip himself up with
stimulants when the necessities of the
situation demand it. But it is a serious
business at best, and it ought not to be
tampered with short of a special emergency,
and then only under medical direction.

THE BATH-FOR BODY
AND SOUL

CHAPTER XIV

'T^HE fundamental difference between the
"■■ class of people we call "the great
unwashed" and the rest of us is not really
one of cleanliness. That is merely an ex-
ternal symbol. The real difference lies
deeper and is harder to get rid of. Put a
typical specimen of the "unwashed" through
a Turkish bath, and you will not have
changed his class. He will not yet have
entered into the glorious company of the
washed.

A scrupulously well-kept skin is usually
associated with the possession of a culti-
vated taste, a susceptibility to fine and
delicate things, a degree of self-respect which
is more than skin deep. The unwashed
are the people who have no such per-
ceptions.

In her opening address to the students of
Bryn Mawr college last fall. President
Thomas brought out this point effectively.
"In our generation," she said, "a great gulf
is fixed that no democracy or socialistic

141

142 The Efficient Life

theories can bridge over between men and
women that take a bath every day and nien
and women that do not."

And she went on: "It is the difference of
which bathing is a symbol that makes mar-
riage between people of different social
habits so disastrous." A man's bath-habits,
it seems, point back to his ideals of life, to
his standards of culture.

The real reason for taking a daily bath
is not to keep clean. A bath once a week
would answer such needs well enough. As
far as the actual demands of health go, we
could doubtless get along on even less.
The reason is psychological. Not for the
body, but for the soul.

The skin is what separates the individual
from the universe. It is a line of demarca-
tion. In a certain sense it is the boundary
of a man's personality. It serves not only
for protection, but also for information.
All the knowledge we have of the world out-
side ourselves comes through the medium
of the skin. The embryologist has shown
that all the organs of special sense, sight,
hearing, and the rest, are simply develop-

The Bath — For Body and Soul 143

ments of the outer or skin-layer of the
embryo. The skin deserves respectful
consideration.

From the millions of delicate nerve-end-
ings on the surface of the body, a continual
flow of messages is carried along the nerves
to the brain. Even where the messages are
too minute to be distinguished, they settle
for us what we call our general state of
feeling — whether we feel well or feel dull,
or out of sorts.

The more scrupulously the skin is looked
after, the more responsive it will be to the
stimuli that it gets from the outside world,
and the more accurate and well organised
will be the information which passes on to
the brain.

A cold bath in the morning raises the
level of our mental activity. It wakes us up,
it increases the supply of energy. A bath
after the close of the day's work means that
we have put off the old man with his deeds,
that we have left the office with its business
behind and are prepared for something else.
It is an act of respect to our personality.

The value of any special variety of bath

144 The Efficient Life

depends upon a man's own constitution.
Nothing could be worse for some people
than a cold morning plunge. Indeed, the
very people who are apt to make this habit
a matter of conscience, are the ones who will
probably get nothing but harm out of it.
The thin, nervous man, whose greatest
danger lies in living too energetically, is the
very man who will force himself heroically
into the morning tub. On the other hand,
the man who is hampered with an excess of
fat and a sluggish brain will probably stay
comfortably in bed until breakfast time.
This is unfortunate.

What really determines the value of the
cold bath to a man is the kind of reaction
which follows it. In some cases this is too
large. The cold in such cases is too great
a stimulus and the ultimate result is great
depression.

The cases are more frequent where the
reaction fails to come at all. The heat-
making power of the body is not great
enough to respond to the shock. Instead,
the muscles grow stiff, the skin gets blue,
and the teeth chatter. The constitution of

The Bath— For Body and Soul 145

the man was not made to stand such violent
treatment.

In a normal case the first effect of the
cold water is to take all heat from the sur-
face of the body. The small arteries and
capillaries in that region are suddenly con-
tracted and the blood is driven away. But
this is immediately followed by a vigorous
rallying of all the body forces. The muscles
begin to contract and expand rapidly, pro-
ducing an increase of heat; the blood rushes
energetically through the whole system,
respiration is deeper — the whole activity of
the body is toned up to a higher level.

Putting the case formally, a normal
reaction depends upon five things:

(1 ) The Suddenness of the Bath, — ^You pre-
vent any good results if all you do is to cool
the water gradually, so as to make the pro-
cess easier. That will simply chill the body.

(2) The Temperature of the Water. — This
must be suited to each man's reacting power.
Some people can stand a plunge into ice
water without any harm; but it would send
others galley-west.

(3) The Temperature of the Man, — ^If the

146 The Efficient Life

body is already chilled, it is probably not
the right time for a cold bath.

(4) Muscle-activity, — Shivering is one way
in which the muscles respond to the shock.
Vigorous rubbing of the skin, kicking, or
any other kind of quick exercise for arms
and legs, hurries things along and makes
the reaction more complete.

(5) Habit. — Tho man who is accustomed
to cold water baths will probably have a
more effective reaction than the man whose
body is unprepared for it. It takes time
to get the habit, and a man cannot judge
fairly of the value of the bath for himself
until he has given it a fair trial. Do not
be too severe with yourself at the start. A
cold sponge over a small area is a good
means of getting the thing under way.

So much for cold baths. The hot bath
has almost a contrary effect. For a moment
to be sure, there is a contraction of the sur-
face blood vessels, but this is immediately
followed by a relaxing of the muscles that
control them, and the blood vessels become
greatly dilated. The skin gets full of blood;
the heart beats faster. In order to keep th^

The Bath — For Body and Soul 147

temperature of the body down to normal,
the sweat glands begin to work vigorously.

The special use of the hot bath is to draw
away the blood from some congested part,
such as the head; also, to relax the tension
of the system. A man sometimes cannot
get rest just because he is nervously ex-
hausted. A hot bath may bring him ex-
actly what he needs.

There are a great number of special
varieties of baths, each of which hits cer-
tain conditions. On account of the close
connection between the circulation in the
back of the neck and that in the nose and
brain, it is found that cold applications on
the neck are a help in nose-bleed. A head-
ache can often be reached by cold-and-hots
to the same place.

Bad circulation in liver and kidneys can
often be remedied by hot applications to the
surface of the body nearest those organs,
and other disturbances in the body cavity
can be affected by the same means. Every-
body knows the value of local applications
in the case of a sprain or some other in-
flammation. A dash of cold water in the

148 The Efficient Life

face will often knock out a congestion in the
brain accompanied by dull headaches and
niake it possible for a man to think clearly
again.

But after all, the most practical value of
the bath as an institution, is the psycholog-
ical one. When a man is fagged out, a
good bath will bring back his energy and
change his state of mind. The increased
thoroughness of the circulation, the clearing
of the brain, the stimulus to the countless
nerve terminals in the skin — all these effects
have a distinct bearing on those general
feelings of health and well-being which
make joyful and efficient living possible.

People who are down with the "blues"
have often gotten over them by taking the
right kinds of baths. Much pessimism
has been put out of business by this rather
unpicturesque means. Much more still
awaits treatment.

The only difficulty is that the method is
so simple.

PAIN-THE DANGER
SIGNAL

CHAPTER XV

TF YOU have a pain you are conscious
of it. If you are not conscious of it,
the pain does not exist. The cause of it
may be there still; but pain itself is an
affair of consciousness and nothing else.

In trying to find out what pain means
and how to treat it, it is necessary to keep
this in mind. We tend to act all the time
as if the pain itself were the bottom fact;
whereas in reality it is only a sort of indica-
tor. The bottom fact lies deeper. If a
man has ether given him, he no longer has
any pain; yet the conditions that gave rise
to the pain have not changed at all.

Pain is like a danger signal on a railroad.
It is put there for the purpose of attracting
attention. Something is wrong on the track
— a washout or a wreck somewhere, that
blocks traflSc. There are two ways of
treating the signal. One is to cover it up — •
to act as if it were not there. The other is
to clear the track.

You can treat pain in the same way. You

151

1^2 The Efficient Life

can crowd it under with drugs so that you
will not be aware of it, or you may try to
set right whatever the indicator told you
was wrong.

When a man is trying to get rid of a pain
he always ought to ask himself whether he
is striking simply at the pain itself or whether
he is getting at the underlying cause.

There are times when it is perfectly right
to aim at the pain, It may be intense —
the kind that drives everything else out of
your mind, makes thinking impossible;
and the cause may be too deep to get at
quickly. Perhaps some mportant work
must be carried through; it may be essen-
tial for a man to stick to his job a little
longer. In a case like that, no one could
blame him for giving the knockout to his
pain sense.

He does this, however, at his peril. He
ought to realise the fact. From that mo-
ment on he has assumed absolute respon-
sibility for the conditions, whatever they
are, that gave rise to the pain. When the
pain itself is not present any longer to re-
mind him that something is wrong, he is ini

Pain — The Danger Signal 153

danger of forgetting it, for he has nothing
but his memory and his will-power to depend
upon. The danger signal was set and he
has deliberately run by it. He may be able
to take his train a little farther, but the track
has not been repaired, and if nobody keeps
watch of things, there will be a "smash up."

A headache powder does not hit the cause
of the headache any more than a laxative
hits the cause of constipation or a spoonful
of pepsin the cause of indigestion. You
have cut out the symptoms, but the root of
the trouble is still untouched. It is a root
that will keep on sprouting, too.

Pain is associated with things that are
harmful — with the forces of destruction.
That relation is a constant one. Without
the warning of pain we should have no
means of learning at first hand what sort of
experiences were not good for us. We
could cram ourselves with green fruit and
never discover that there was anything to be
avoided in such a diet. Pain teaches us
differently; and its lessons are not forgot-
ten over night.

It is a theory of biologists that pain-sense

154 The Efficient Life

was the earliest development of conscious
life. Sensation first came to some primitive
invertebrate in sharp stinging flashes —
sense messages that had a positive effect
upon its actions. "Stop, quick," they
directed, or "Let go," or "Don't eat that
again" — signs for contraction, or rigidity,
or flight. An animal that responded to
these flashes had a better chance of living
and producing offspring than one that did
not. It was for the good of the race that
pain entered into its experience.

Pain has never been meaningless. It
always points somewhere, tells something;
and if we dare put the extinguisher on it,
we must not fool ourselves into thinking
that it is the end of the matter.

As a general thing, the pain points pretty
directly to its cause. You can usually put
your finger on the root- trouble. When you
have a burnt hand, you do not need to ask
yourself where the pain comes from, nor
what it means.

But this does not always hold. It occa-
sionally happens that the relation between
the pain and the cause is complex and hard

Pain — The Danger Signal 155

to trace. ''Reflex irritation," physiologists
call it. A headache usually belongs to this
class. It may be due to any one of a hun-
dred causes, and the one it is finally followed
back to may have seemed the most im-
probable of all.

I have met with cases in which chronic
headache of the most aggravated type was
caused by flat feet. Yet there was no sign
of pain in the feet themselves, and the per-
son had never suspected that there was any
connection there. Even a physician could
not be sure of it, for often enough flat feet
do not seem to have any effect on the general
health. But in these cases, when the diflS-
culty was corrected, the headache com-
pletely disappeared.

It is not quite clear why this should be so.
Perhaps the spreading of the arch had re-
sulted in a stretching of the nerves of the
foot, and this constant tension may have
reacted on the brain.

I know the case of one woman of great
executive ability who wa5 a nervous invalid
for years without anyone being able to
account for her condition. She had to give

156 The Efficient Life

up her work completely. She was prac-
tically confined to a single room. She was
supplied with plates for her feet. It turned
out that the cause of her trouble lay exactly
there, and her recovery followed so quickly
that it was hard to believe it.

Reflex irritations may come from diflSculty
in the digestive tract; they may come from
a bad condition of the teeth or from some
slight displacement in the reproductive
organs — in short, from any part of the body.
So small a matter as the constant pressure
of a corn may give rise to serious disturb-
ances in the intestines or the head.

Perhaps the eyes are the commonest
source. Strain in the eyes is hardly ever
felt there first. Instead it gives rise to
headaches. A man's eyes may keep him
in perpetual misery without his ever so much
as suspecting it.

These connections between the reflex
irritation and ks real cause are most per-
plexing and mysterious. They often seem il-
logical— ^you cannot predict them in advance.

There is only one way of discovering the
actual cause and effect relation, and that is

Pain — The Danger Signal 157

elimination. If I have no clue to a per-
sistent case of headache, the only thing for
me to do is to make a thorough and de-
tailed examination of the whole body in
order to detect any and every condition
which might possibly account for the
trouble. One by one all these conjectured
causes must be eradicated. There is a
good chance then that the actual cause will
finally be hit on. It is my opinion that every
man ought to have himself carefully examined
once a year by a skillful physician who can be
relied upon to give him trustworthy advice.

He owes this to himself. A man has no right
to be wasting his energy or cutting down his
supply when he could just as well have an
abundance of it. Pain is costly. It unfits us
for giving attention to other things. It keeps
us on a constant strain. It destroys eflSciency.

Simply to blot it out of the consciousness
is at best a makeshift. To find the real
cause and to correct it may be a long and
tiresome process, but in the end it is the
only economical course of action.

A good engineer pays attention to thf
ganger-signal.

VISION

CHAPTER XVI

/^NE of my friends, a professor in an
eastern university, has for thirty
years suffered from almost constant head-
aches. These vary in intensity from day
to day, from week to week, but they are
rarely absent. He goes to sleep readily
but generally awakes in the middle of the
night, and is prone to lie sleepless thereafter.
He has had constant difficulty with his
stomach, and periods of nervous exhaustion
when he could do very little work have been
frequent.

As a result of this constant pain and the
nervous exhaustion, his own personal re-
action to life is much of the time sad. His
philosophy is deliberately optimistic, but
during a great part of his life it has to yield
to the state of his feelings.

My friend tried many remedies. For
a year he was under the care of a physician
who put him on an exclusively meat diet.
With this there seemed to result a tem-
porary improvement, but it was not per-

161

i62 The Efficient Life

manent. He tried long periods of outdoor
rest and exercise, and he found that mountain
cHmbing and the Hke would always help
him markedly. But the improvement was
usually of short duration, and upon returning
to work his old pains and disabilities would
reappear promptly.

He next fell into the hands of a specialist,
who operated upon him for piles. This
specialist said that all his other symptoms
of ill health were merely reflexes from this
trouble. But the results, so far as general
health and feeling were concerned, were
negative.

For a period he was given the modern
mechanical massage by means of electric
machines, and his general health was
slightly bettered; but no profound change,
no cure of the headaches resulted. One
physician put him on tonics, such as iron
and strychnine, but without achieving any
generally good effect.

At the age of thirteen my friend had had
a partial sunstroke. One physician thought
that his constant headaches might be due
to permanent dilatation of the capillaries of

Vision 163

the brain, induced at that time; but an
examination made by a specialist in nervous
diseases contradicted this opinion. Appli-
cations of cold to the head and to the back
of the neck failed to reduce the symptoms.
Hence dilatation of the cerebral capillaries
was manifestly not the cause of his ill health.
Lastly his eyes were thoroughly examined
(they had been superficially examined be-
fore) and glasses were prescribed. There
was no immediate change and it seemed
as though the search for health were again
to result in failure. But then slowly an
improvement began, and in the course of a
few weeks it was very real. Presently,
however, his general condition again began
to deteriorate. Then it was observed that
on one of his eyehds was a minute growth,
which pressed upon the eye and changed
its shape about one three-hundredth of an
inch. The removal of this growth acted
like a magic wand. For a short time he
seemed perfectly well. He enjoyed life;
his work was a pleasure in itself, which had
not been the case for years. His digestion
was good, and he slept well. But he soon

164 The Efficient Life

began to go back. Then repeated ex-
aminations showed that his eyes are under-
going a rather rapid change in shape, and
until this is completed constant readjust-
ment of glasses will be necessary.

I have given this picture somewhat in
detail because, with many variations in
particulars, it represents the experiences
of unknown thousands. Probably one-
quarter of all the educated people in America
suffer from disturbances of various kinds,
which are more or less due to eye strain.

This eye strain in a large number of cases
creates an extraordinary and altogether not
to be expected general condition of the body.
Dr. George M. Gould of Philadelphia, one
of our most brilliant physicians and writers,
has in five volumes called attention to these
general effects of eye strain with such force
as to secure the assent of most thoughtful
medical men, by showing that the serious
disturbances of life in such men as Carlyle,
Huxley, Wagner, and a score of others, were
occasioned by strained eyes.

It frequently happens that persons suffer-
ing not only from headaches, but also

Vision 165

backaches, sometimes indigestion, and even
hysteria — are cured of these troubles through
the use of simple spectacles. Professor
Schoen of Leipsic reports the case of a girl
with epileptic seizures which were due to
eye strain. He says that the constant effort
on the part of the child to bring the two eyes
into uniform working condition, in the course
of time brought about nervous disorders of
an intermittent character and finally resulted
in permanent disturbances in the brain.
At first thought all this appears to savor
of quackery. It sounds as though these
were impossible associations, but they have
been proven facts.

How is it possible that strain upon muscles
so small as those of the eyes can produce
such tremendous disturbances of the whole
organism ? If I should seriously overwork
one of the small muscles of my forearm, for
example, the one that moves one of the
fingers, it would become lame and sore; but
it would be difficult for me by means of such
overwork to produce constant headache,
backache, nervous exhaustion, and indi-
gestion. And yet these symptoms are

i66 The EfEcient Life

constantly associated with eye strain. It is
true that by persistent overwork of the
muscles of the hand, people do get into
disordered conditions — for instance, type-
writer's cramp and telegrapher's palsy; but
these disorders do not seem to involve any-
thing like the upsetting of the whole system,
that complete nervous exhaustion, which
is the result of eye strain.

The reason for this tremendous result of
eye strain appears to be at least partly this :
The effect produced is not due so much to
the size of the muscles involved, as to the
relation which those muscles bear to the
vital parts of the human machinery. The
pictures that are made in our eyes, and that
are always being translated into nerve cur-
rents and reported to the brain, form the
foundation for our thinking. They con-
stitute a far larger factor of the brain than
the mere activity, and through interference
with it many of the other organisms are
disturbed. Constant exhaustion and strain
of these visual centres frequently causes
disturbances of the most extensive char-
acter.

Vision 167

We might imagine a case in which those
muscles that move the fingers would play
a somewhat equally important role — from
the standpoint of mental operations in-
volved— as the muscles of the eyes. Take
the case of a blind man who does extensive
reading with his fingers and who is engaged
in work that requires the constant detection
of small differences by means of his fingers.
Under such conditions we should expect
that a derangement of the muscular appa-
ratus of the fingers would have a far more
serious result upon a man's organism as a
whole, than would be effected in those of us
who do not use the fingers in a way that is so
directly related to intelligence.

The strain of civilisation rests heavier
upon the eyes than upon any of the other
bodily organs. This is not because
vision is more important to civilised man
than is any other sense, but because man's
eyes in a civilised community are used
differently from what they are used in savage

i68 The Efficient Life

life. No other part of the body has had the
emphasis upon its work changed so greatly
as has the eye. The savage had to look at
near things and far things, at large things
and small things, equally — while modern
man reads.

The capacity for seeing type belongs to the
normal eye, and it is only because we have
tasked this capacity to a tremendous degree
and for considerable periods every day, in
order to distinguish the small differences in
these black marks on white paper, that
there exists this strain which is producing
deterioration of the civilised eye. People
with good eyesight among us have as good
vision as the savages possess. This has
been repeatedly demonstrated. But the
percentage among us of those suffering
from astigmatism, shortsightedness, and
longsightedness is indefinably greater than
it is among them.

There is another difference between the
civilised and the savage use of the eye.
The civilised man will look for long periods
at things which are at close range. Even
when he is not reading, he will not see

Vision 169

anything farther removed than the wall of the
room — which is but a few feet away. The
savage, living most of the time out of doors,
has usually a long focus and he only occasion-
ally uses the short focus. The house-
living man most of the time uses the short
focus, much of the time the exceedingly
short focus of fifteen to eighteen inches, and
only occasionally the long focus of the open.
It is found that deformities of the eye
increase from year to year during school
life, thus showing that they are acquired
and that the school is responsible for making
them. Approximately one- third of all the
children in the upper grades of the el-
ementary schools have eyes which rather
seriously need correction by means of
spectacles.

In view of the fact that the most serious
results of eye deformity and eye strain are
not indicated by eye pains, how may one
tell whether or not it is the eyes that need
treatment? There is only one way to do:

!7o The Efficient Life

Whenever there are headaches or backaches,
interferences with digestion, and nervous
exhaustion — ^which symptoms are not clearly
traceable to and curable by other definite
measures — the eyes should be examined.
They are peculiarly vulnerable and they
must be suspected when there exist symp-
toms of the kind that I have mentioned
which cannot be traced wholly to other
sources.

What about reading on the cars.? I
think this question must be viewed in a
common-sense way. For example — person-
ally, I read on the cars most of the time,
because it is practically the only time that
I have for reading; and reading is of such
importance to me that I am willing to incur
the danger of overworking the eyes in order
to get the reading done. But we can safe-
guard our reading on cars and trains in
two ways.

(1) We can select for reading that book
or magazine which has clear type, good
margins, and lines sufficiently short and
far apart so that when the eye travels from
the end of one line to the beginning of the

Vision 171

next, it will not be apt to fall on the wrong
place. By giving attention to these points,
we are able to read with but a fraction of the
strain which otherwise such reading w^ould
involve. The strain of reading in a
subway, by artificial light, or on a train at
night, when paper, type, lines, and setting
are good, is not nearly as severe as when
opposite conditions obtain.

(2) There is another thing that we can do,
and that is to select for reading on the cars
those books that necessitate more study
than they do reading. Some articles and
books w^e skim over and race through: We
digest them faster than we can read them.
Other books require slow reading; one must
repeatedly study and think over what has
been read, or follow out side lines of sug-
gested thought. This is the type of book
for reading on trains — the book that re-
quires study and thinking.

A little scheme which has been of great
service to me is that of cutting up books
which I want to read, so that they may be
carried in the pocket one part at a time.
The type of modern newspaper and its

172 The Efficient Life

subject matter are not such that I want to
spend all my time on the cars in reading litera-
ture of this kind. But by the plan of taking
books and cutting them into parts, the total
amount of good literature read by me in the
course of a month has been about doubled.
I confess, the first time that I stuck my
knife into the back of a well-bound volume,
I felt as though I were committing sacrilege,
for I love and reverence books ; but in view
of the great profit that I have derived from
this method of conducting my reading, I
now do not hestitate to employ it.

Sometimes I see women on the cars read-
ing through their veils. They should give
up either the reading or the veils.

A practical thing when reading is to look
up and off for a moment every little while.
This relaxes the strain under which the
eyes are working when they are focussed
at short range.

Another point to be kept in mind is that
while our eyes are adjusted to outdoor light,
this is always reflected light. A direct
light injures them. Our eyes can bear the
brilliant illumination of sunshine, but they are

Vision 173

hurt by having even a sixteen candle power
electric light shine into them directly. It
is these irritating streams of light that do
harm, rather than the general flood of light.
This is because the pupil of the eye adjusts
itself so as to admit light in proportion to
the general illumination, and one irritating
stream of light will not serve to contract the
pupil sufficiently. Hence it is particularly
important for us to avoid reading or doing
anything else in a position where a bright
light shines directly into the eyes.

The only good plan of lighting a room
artificially is to use reflected light. That
is, the electric bulbs should be so arranged
that the light is thrown upon the ceiling, in
which case the brilliant carbons are not
directly visible to persons in the room. This
method requires more light, but it saves the
eyes. Light is never pleasant nor safe for
the eyes when one can directly see its
source.

When the eyes are fatigued from long use,
a cold bath to the face — and particularly
a cold washing of the eyes — are useful.
But the main thing is to use the eyes reason-

174 The Efficient Life

ably, to secure glasses which will stop the
strain or abnormal action of the eyes, and
also to see that they do not become
disordered.

Disorders of the eyes not merely affect
the rest of the body, but the eyes themselves
in many cases act as a sensitive barometer
with reference to the conditions in the rest
of the body. People with weak eyes will
be far more apt to have eye pains when they
are suffering from indigestion or overwork,
than when normal conditions of health
obtain. In the case spoken of at the be-
ginning of this article, the eye trouble was
always an indication of the general health.
Therefore, it is most important that people
who experience difficulties with their eyes
should keep themselves in good general
health.

VITALITY— THE ARMOUR
OF OFFENCE

CHAPTER XVII

'IpWO men undergo operations of the
same character in a hospital. The
same surgeon does the work. The
conditions are identical. Equal care is
exercised in each operation, and each
is successfully performed. Yet one man
recovers, the other dies.

There is a tremendous business pressure
which does not let up for months. It puts
men under terrible strain. One man goes
to pieces and his business is wrecked. He
cannot keep the pace; he loses control of
himself. His rival has no better brains
than he — perhaps not so good — ^yet he pulls
through successfully.

We say that there is a difference in vitality;
that one man has more of it than the other.

I once saw a man in a hospital who was
suffering from five fatal diseases ; and yet he
would not die. He had kept on living year
after year in spite of everything. He
refused to succumb.

We find the same thing illustrated every

177

178 The Efficient Life

day. In a shipwreck there are many who
seem to give up their lives without a struggle,
without any power to resist. Others cling
to an open raft for days without food,
almost frozen, constantly whipped by the
waves; but for some reason or other they
survive. The vitality in them is strong.

Notice how rapidly and surely one man
recovers himself after a nervous break-
down, while another drags along through
years of semi-invalidism. Notice the results
upon two men of a long, cold drench of rain.
One of them comes down with pneumonia;
the other suffers no ill effects. How is it
to be explained.?

He has a reserve somewhere, an inner
power of resistance, an aggressive something
that will not be downed — and we call it
vitality. A man cannot have a more val-
uable asset than that. It means joy in-
stead of dumps, success instead of failure,
life, perhaps, instead of death.

There are different ways of looking at
disease. The simplest way, the most primi-
tive way, is to look at it merely as something
to be cured. This explains the power of

Vitality — The Armour of Offence 179

the medicine man, the miracle worker. To
cure disease is what we constantly ask of
a physician to-day. But after all, this is
a mere repair work; it is like patching up a
leaky boiler. It is necessary — no one doubts
that; but from the most advanced point of
view, its place is restricted. It is no longer
the all-important thing.

A much larger work is that of prevention.
In recent years we have begun to realise this.
We try to provide such an environment for
a man that disease cannot get at him. We
provide good ventilation, we purify the
drinking water, analyse the milk, work out
problems of sanitation, kill off the germ-
bearing mosquitoes. It is the distinctively
modern attitude toward disease.

But there is another way of looking at
the matter. It has to do with the vitality
of a man; it is internal, not external. If
the external conditions of a man's life are
important, the internal conditions are still
more so. If a man is so full of vitality, of
resisting power, that he beats off every on-
slaught of disease, he is better off than the
man who keeps well only because he hag

i8o The Efficient Life

built a stockade about himself and Hves
inside it.

One can easily picture a town protected
by every safeguard of sanitary science,
furnished with germless food and distilled
water, on every side completely shut off
from danger. Yet that town might contain
a most weak and puny set of people — people
who lacked power, vigour and health, and
were entirely unable to do hard work.
They might have to be constantly fighting
against breakdowns; they might have no
capacity for enjoying life.

Vitality is not simply freedom from dis-
ease. It is something far more fundamental
in a man's life than that. It is usually the
men of tremendous vitality who exert an
influence upon the work of the world. They
are the men of power. We can all pick out
business and professional men who have
gone to the top because of their vitality,
their ability to do things, to push, to stand
strain.

It is commonly supposed that the bigger
a man's muscles, the more vitality he must
have. That is absurd. Some of the most

Vitality — The Armour of Offence i8i

muscular men I have known have gone
under because of deficient vitality. They
had built up tremendously powerful muscles
on the outside of their bodies; but they
lacked the inner power — resistance. Many
of the strong men who go on exhibition have
sunken eyes, drawn cheeks: they show the
effects of the vital strain under which they
live. They are constantly *' too fine." They
are deficient in the kind of strength that
counts.

It is true that to do a certain amount of
physical exercise is one of the ways of con-
serving vitality; but it is not the most
important w^ay. The problem goes deeper
than that. It involves a great deal more
than the muscular system. It is a matter
in which the whole personality of the man,
his body and his mind, are involved.

Vitality depends on two things: what a
man inherits from his parents, and what he
does with himself — his habits of life.

It is not in his power to control the first.
If he comes into the world with generations
of city life behind him, his vitality inheri-
tance will not be the best. There is a good

i82 The Efficient Life

deal in the old saying about the need of
returning to the soil every third generation.
Vitality appears to be in inverse ratio to
the number of years the family has lived
away from the soil. The children of parents
who have led the nervously intense and
exhausting lives of cities are likely to be
delicate and nervous, and without the
ability to stand even an ordinary amount
of wear and tear. No attention to hygienic
living, muscular exercise, and the like, can
make up to them for this deficiency in their

inheritance.

Vitality is not a thing that can be created.
If the organism does not possess it, there is
nothing for a man to do except to learn how
to get along as best he can with the least
possible outlay of energy.

But most of us are not in that situation.
We have vitality enough if we will only
make the most of it — learn how to develop
and stimulate it. That is the practical
problem. We have to put up for better or
worse with our inheritance, but the use we
make of that inheritance rests with ourselves.

Maximum vitality and maximum eflSciency

Vitality— The Armour of Offence 183

are tied up with each other. What makes for
one makes for both. To learn how to attain
one is to learn how to attain the other.

Physical conditions are important —
healthy muscles, good digestion, normal
weight, and the rest; but they need not be
taken up in detail here.

The real heart of the problem is psycho-
logical. We are just beginning to under-
stand the part that good thinking holds in
good heath. Our thoughts are just as
real a part of us as are our bodies. A man
who persists in thinking unhealthy thoughts
can no more keep sound and healthy in
body than a man who violates all the physical
laws of his nature.

A man's mental attitude is fundamental.
It is a well-known fact that the number of
deaths in an army defeated and under re-
treat is enormously greater than in an army
upon a victorious march. The mental atti-
tude of defeat, of discouragement, lowers
the resisting power of the individual. It pre-
disposes him to disease. The whole tone of
his system is let down. His body becomes
a fertile seeding-ground for infection.

184 The Efficient Life

The aggressive, the positive, the confident
state of mind is the one that wins out over ob-
stacles. A man who keeps on the defensive
all the time, dreading danger, fighting against
bad influences, avoiding disease, not only
wastes an enormous amount of energy but
also lessens his own chances. It is not the
defensive attitude that protects a man.

It is useless to say "I will not think of this
thing." No man can do that successfully.
The man who piously resolves not to worry
about his liver trouble will worry about it
all the more. He cannot help it.

The normal way, the efficient way, is to
turn one's thoughts to something worth
while — ^to fill the mind with healthy thoughts.
This is sound psychology. You cannot
drag a thing out of the mind; but it will go
of itself if you put something else in its
place. A determined pursuit of good
thoughts, of healthy thoughts, is the only
means of getting rid of the other kind.

Carlyle talks about the Everlasting Yea.
To live the positive life — the life of affirma-
tion— is to live the life that carries on
efficiently its part in the work of the world.

GROWTH IN REST

CHAPTER XVIIt

/^^ROWTH is predominantly a function
^"^ of rest. Work is chiefly an energy-
expending and tearing-down process. Rest
following work is chiefly a building-up and
growing process. Work may furnish the
conditions under which subsequent growth
may occur, but in itself it is destructive.
By work we do things in the world, but we
do not grow by work. We grow during
rest. Rest is not the only condition of
growth. It is, however, one of the essential
conditions. It is peculiarly a topic which
needs discussion in these days of con-
centration.

We seek concentrated food. We seek
concentrated reading; the day of the three
volume novel has passed. We demand that
the world's news shall be epitomised. We
demand that our writing shall be taken
down in shorthand and written by machine.
We demand that business shall be done by
telegraph, telephone, or wireless. We de-
mand that our expresses shall travel fifty

187

i88 The Efficient Life

miles an hour or more, and that while on the
expresses we shall be able to economise
time by having stenographers and libraries.
We read on the cars. The habit of reading
during meals is growing.

All these concentrated activities, these
ways of doing more work in less time, of
shortening the period between thought and
action, between the conceiving of an idea
and its working out into the real world — or
perhaps more truly the visible world,
because the real world is the thinking
world — make immensely for world achieve-
ment. But they do not make for growth
of the self — they tend to dwarf the indivi-
dual by sapping his power.

I might caricature this aspect of the
times by taking a splendid frame and then
pasting on some neutral background within
this frame pictures of the world's master-
pieces. The pictures should be fitted as
closely as their forms permitted. They
should be cut in outline, so that no picture
had a background. Every bit of back-
ground must be fitted with some other
picture. Every inch of space should be

Growth in Rest 189

economised by filling it with some beautiful,
worthy thing. In a frame measuring three
by four feet I could have a large portion of
the world's masterpieces in representation.
But it would give me neither happiness nor
any true conception of these masterpieces,
for none would have setting or margin.

Proper setting and proper margin are
essential to every work of art. So if life's
work and life's thinking are to result in
growth, they too must have their margin,
their proper setting, their opportunity for
assimilation.

During the day the chief work of the body
is done, but during the night the tissues
grow more than they do during the day.
The food is worked over, the muscles are
built up, the brain tissue is restored, the
vacuolated nerve cells become refilled and
their crinkled borders become smoothed and
rounded. This is margin, this is setting.
It is the working up into the subjective self
of the food and the results of the objective
day's work.

The process is not less necessary with
reference to mental work. The student

190 The EfScient Life

who spends all of his available time in the
acquiring of facts misses the chief end of
study. Wisdom does not consist in a
knowledge of facts, but in their assimilation
— ^just as art does not consist merely in form
and colour, but also in margin and setting.
Our facts need assimilation. They need to
be worked over into the tissue of our mental
life. The daily emotions, the struggles,
the ideals that come to us need to be worked
over into the self. This occurs chiefly dur-
ing quiet, during rest. The man who has
no quiet and no rest assimilates relatively
little. A man's experiences must be turned
over and thought about. A man's ideals
must be dreamed over and dreamed out.
It may be true that sleep bears somewhat
the same relation to mental growth that it
does to physical growth, that thus partially
or even entirely in an unconscious way the
facts of daily life are worked over into the
tissue of character. It is certainly true
that we often awake in the morning after
a good night's sleep and find problems
solved, the mental atmosphere clarified in
fi way that is altogether surprising, an<J

Growth in Rest 191

which is not to be accounted for apparently
merely by our being more rested. We know
that the brain is not wholly inactive during
sleep. We know that there are psychic
processes going on of one kind or another.
I do not know what direct evidence could
be procured to prove or disprove this
hypothesis. It does seem, however, to fit
in with very many well-established and
otherwise not adequately explained facts.
The best work that most of us do is not
begun in our oflSices or at our desks, but when
we are wandering in the woods or sitting
quietly with undirected thoughts. From
somewhere at such times there flash into our
minds those ideas that direct and control
our lives — visions of how to do that which
previously had seemed impossible, new as-
pirations, hopes, and desires. Work is the
process of realisation. The careful balance
and the great ideas come largely during
quiet, and without being sought. The man
who never takes time to do nothing will
hardly do great things. He will hardly
have epoch-making ideas or stimulating
ideals.

192 The Efficient Life ^

Rest is thus not merely in order to recuper-
ate for work. If so, we should rest only
when fatigued. We need to do nothing at
times when we are as well as possible — ^when
our whole natures are ready for their very
finest product. We need occasionally to
leave them undirected, in order that we
may receive these messages by wireless
from the Unknown. We need to have the
instrument working at its greatest perfec-
tion, be undirected and receptive.

I am not advocating a mystic ideal.
This imagery is fruitful, whether these
ideas and ideals come wholly from within
and are the adjustment and readjustment
even of material products, or whether they
come to us as the response of the individual
to external stimuli.

The fundamental characteristic of youth
is growth — happy, continuous growth. Is
not the reason why so many of us look back
to youth as the period of greatest happiness
because it was the time of greatest growth ?
I think that the people whom I know as
most happy in middle and advanced years
are those persons who have kept on growing.

Growth in Rest 193

The as yet relatively httle known re-
searches of Cajal and Flechsig have shown
us that the tangential fibres of the brain may
continue their growth at least through
middle life, and it appears also that the
fibres are in some way directly related to
intelligence.

Most people seem to stop growing soon
after they become twenty. Other people
keep on growing for varying periods. The
duration of life's growth is governed partly
by heredity and it is partly under our own
control. It is limited by forced work with-
out rest and margin. It is promoted by
wholesome living. It is interfered with by
routine work without a break. We must
retain the habit of doing unhabitual things
if we are to grow.

All this may seem like the statement of an
impossible ideal. It is not. There will
come weeks and months when every ounce
of strength and every moment of time must
be spent on the accomplishment of certain
things. But when this is a man's constant
life, when it occurs month after month and
year after year, then it indicates that th^

194 The Efficient Life

work has mastered the man. The man is no
longer the master; he is the slave. It
means that his growth and his capacity to
do larger and larger things are prevented.

I know men as secretaries of Young
Men's Christian Associations, as college
physical directors, as the owners or directors
of immense corporations; I know women
as housewives and mothers of large families,
who have preserved this balance between
work and rest, so that they have continued
growing, so that their ideals have enlarged
from decade to decade, so that their
response to life has been ever larger.

But with these people there has been a
clear conprehension of the tremendous ten-
dency of the time away from margin, away
from rest, away from balance. They have
set their faces like a flint and have not
allowed the immediate pressure of the
moment, the drag of the deadly detail, to so
chain them down as to prevent their moving
toward the far larger and more important
ideal that is farther in the distance.

A dime held close enough to the eye will
^hut out the whole world. The small duty

Growth in Rest 195

close at hand may shut out all vision, all
ideals. The great ideals are never near.
The small duty is always with us. There
are always things to be done. In order to
achieve the greatest which is within each
one of us, we must balance between the
small duties which could never be com-
pletely done — ^had we ten times our present
time and strength — and the distant ideals.
We must be able to say to the immediate
and small, ** Stand back! That is your
place! This is the time for rest, for margin,
for assimilation, for growth."

Rest is as important as work. Dreams
must precede action. Concentrated art is
not art, and the acquiring of facts is not
growth.

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