whiff of the atmosphere of the hospital, if not of the prison, into
the gymnasium.

These four ideals, while so closely interrelated, are as yet far from
harmonized. Swedish, Turner, Sargent, and American systems are each,
most unfortunately, still too blind to the others' merits and too
conscious of the others' shortcomings. To some extent they are
prevented from getting together by narrow devotion to a single cult,
aided sometimes by a pecuniary interest in the sale of their own
apparatus and books or in the training of teachers according to one
set of rubrics. The real elephant is neither a fan, a rope, a tree nor
a log, as the blind men in the fable contended, each thinking the part
he had touched to be the whole. This inability of leaders to combine
causes uncertainty and lack of confidence in, and of enthusiastic
support for, any system on the part of the public. Even the radically
different needs of the sexes have failed of recognition from the same
partisanship. All together represent only a fraction of the nature and
needs of youth. The world now demands what this country has never had,
a man who, knowing the human body, gymnastic history, and the various
great athletic traditions of the past, shall study anew the whole
motor field, as a few great leaders early in the last century tried to
do; who shall gather and correlate the literature and experiences of
the past and present with a deep sense of responsibility to the
future; who shall examine martial training with all the inspirations,
warnings, and new demands; and who shall know how to revive the
inspiration of the past animated by the same spirit as the Turners,
who were almost inflamed by referring back to the hardy life of the
early Teutons and trying to reproduce its best features; who shall
catch the spirit of, and make due connections with, popular sports
past and present, study both industry and education to compensate