means. To feel mere life a pleasure; to enjoy the moving one's limbs
and exercising one's bodily powers; to play, as it were, with sun and
wind and rain; to rejoice in satisfying the due bodily appetites of a
human animal without fear of degradation or sense of wrong-doing:
yes, and therewithal to be well formed, straight-limbed, strongly
knit, expressive of countenance--to be, in a word, beautiful--that
also I claim. If we cannot have this claim satisfied, we are but
poor creatures after all; and I claim it in the teeth of those
terrible doctrines of asceticism, which, born of the despair of the
oppressed and degraded, have been for so many ages used as
instruments for the continuance of that oppression and degradation.

And I believe that this claim for a healthy body for all of us
carries with it all other due claims: for who knows where the seeds
of disease which even rich people suffer from were first sown: from
the luxury of an ancestor, perhaps; yet often, I suspect, from his
poverty. And for the poor: a distinguished physicist has said that
the poor suffer always from one disease--hunger; and at least I know
this, that if a man is overworked in any degree he cannot enjoy the
sort of health I am speaking of; nor can he if he is continually
chained to one dull round of mechanical work, with no hope at the
other end of it; nor if he lives in continual sordid anxiety for his
livelihood, nor if he is ill-housed, nor if he is deprived of all
enjoyment of the natural beauty of the world, nor if he has no
amusement to quicken the flow of his spirits from time to time: all
these things, which touch more or less directly on his bodily
condition, are born of the claim I make to live in good health;
indeed, I suspect that these good conditions must have been in force
for several generations before a population in general will be really
healthy, as I have hinted above; but also I doubt not that in the