We have eliminated dangerous explosives from our Fourth of July
celebrations, and the ban can as easily be placed upon any other
dangerous product. Just here we inevitably meet the cry of paternalism,
but we shall always be confronted by the question to what extent the
government should stand aside and see its citizens follow the bent of
their appetites and passions over the brink of destruction. It is the
inherent right of government to maintain its own integrity, and this it
can do only through the conservation of the powers of its citizens. If
paternalism is necessary to this end, then paternalism is a governmental
virtue. Better, by far, some paternalism than a race of weaklings.

=Military training.=--We may shrink away from military training in the
schools, just as we shrink from the régime of pugilism; but we may
profit by observing both these types of training in our efforts to
develop some method of training that will render our young people
physically fit. We need some type of training that will eliminate round
and drooping shoulders, weak chests, shambling gait, sluggish
circulation, and shallow breathing. The boys and girls need to be, first
of all, healthy animals with large powers of endurance, elastic,
buoyant, graceful, and in general well set up. These conditions
constitute the foundation for the superstructure of education. The
placid, anæmic, fiberless child is ill prepared in physique to attain to
that mastery of the mental and spiritual world that makes for an
approximation to complete living.

=Examples cited.=--If one will but make a mental appraisement of the
first one hundred people he meets, he will see among the number quite a
few who reveal a lack of physical vigor. They droop and slouch along and
seem to be dragging their bodies instead of being propelled through