perhaps poor light, especially in cities. The diseases and arrest bred
in the young by life in shops, offices, factories, and schools
increase. Work is rigidly bound to fixed hours, uniform standards,
stints and piece-products; and instead of a finished article, each
individual now achieves a part of a single process and knows little of
those that precede or follow. Machinery has relieved the large basal
muscles and laid more stress upon fine and exact movements that
involve nerve strain. The coarser forms of work that involve hard
lifting, carrying, digging, etc., are themselves specialized, and
skilled labor requires more and more brain-work. It has been estimated
that "the diminution of manual labor required to do a given quantity
of work in 1884 as compared with 1870 is no less than 70 per
cent."[11] Personal interest in and the old native sense of
responsibility for results, ownership and use of the finished
products, which have been the inspiration and soul of work in all the
past, are in more and more fields gone. Those who realize how small a
proportion of the young male population train or even engage in
amateur sports with zest and regularity, how very few and picked men
strive for records, and how immediate and amazing are the results of
judicious training, can best understand how far below his
possibilities as a motor being the average modern man goes through
life, and how far short in this respect he falls from fulfilling
nature's design for him.

For unnumbered generations primitive man in the nomad age wandered,
made perhaps annual migrations, and bore heavy burdens, while we ride
relatively unencumbered. He tilled the reluctant soil, digging with
rude implements where we use machines of many man-power. In the stone,
iron, and bronze age, he shaped stone and metals, and wrought with
infinite pains and effort, products that we buy without even knowledge