in the future. Healthy natural industries will be less and less open
to the young. This is the new situation that now confronts those
concerned for motor education, if they would only make good what is
lost.

Some of the results of these conditions are seen in average
measurements of dimensions, proportions, strength, skill, and control.
Despite the excellence of the few, the testimony of those most
familiar with the bodies of children and adults, and their physical
powers, gives evidence of the ravages of modern modes of life that,
without a wide-spread motor revival, can bode only degeneration for
our nation and our race. The number of common things that can not be
done at all; the large proportion of our youth who must be exempted
from any kinds of activity or a great amount of any; the thin limbs,
collapsed shoulders or chests, the bilateral asymmetry, weak hearts,
lungs, eyes, puny and bad muddy or pallid complexions, tired ways,
automatism, dyspeptic stomachs, the effects of youthful error or of
impoverished heredity, delicate and tender nurture, often, alas, only
too necessary, show the lamentable and cumulative effects of long
neglect of the motor abilities, the most educable of all man's powers,
and perhaps the most important for his well-being. If the unfaithful
stewards of these puny and shameful bodies had again, as in Sparta, to
strip and stand before stern judges and render them account, and be
smitten with a conviction of their weakness, guilty deformity, and
arrest of growth; if they were brought to realize how they are fallen
beings, as weak as stern theologians once deemed them depraved, and
how great their need of physical salvation, we might hope again for a
physical renaissance. Such a rebirth the world has seen but twice or
perhaps thrice, and each was followed by the two or three of the
brightest culture periods of history, and formed an epoch in the