regulations of the appetite for combat, and on the whole more wholesome and
robust than those which are merely esthetic. Marching in step gives proper and
uniform movement of legs, arms, and carriage of body; the manual of arms, with
evolution and involution of figures in the ranks, gives each a corporate feeling of
membership, and involves care of personal appearance and accouterments, while
the uniform levels social distinction in dress. For the French and Italian and
especially the German and Russian adolescent of the lower classes, the two or
three years of compulsory military service is often compared to an academic
course, and the army is called, not without some justification, the poor man's
university. It gives severe drill, strict discipline, good and regular hours, plain
but wholesome fare and out-of-door exercise, exposure, travel, habits of
neatness, many useful knacks and devices, tournaments and mimic or play
battles; these, apart from its other functions, make this system a great promoter
of national health and intelligence. Naval schools for midshipmen, who serve
before the mast, schools on board ship that visit a wide curriculum of ports each
year, cavalry schools, where each boy is given a horse to care for, study and
train, artillery courses and even an army drill-master in an academy, or uniform,
and a few exterior features of soldierly life, all give a distinct character to the
spirit of any institution. The very fancy of being in any sense a soldier opens up
a new range of interests too seldom utilized; and tactics, army life and service,
military history, battles, patriotism, the flag, and duties to country, should always
erect a new standard of honor. Youth should embrace every opportunity that
offers in this line, and instruction should greatly increase the intellectual
opportunities created by every interest in warfare. It would be easy to create
pregnant courses on how soldiers down the course of history have lived, thought,
felt, fought, and died, how great battles were won and what causes triumphed in
them, and to generalize many of the best things taught in detail in the best
schools of war in different grades and lands.
A subtle but potent intersexual influence is among the strongest factors of all
adolescent sport. Male birds and beasts show off their charms of beauty and
accomplishment in many a liturgy of love antics in the presence of the female.
This instinct seems somehow continuous with the growth of ornaments in the
mating season. Song, tumbling, balking, mock fights, etc., are forms of animal
courtship. The boy who turns cartwheels past the home of the girl of his fancy, is
brilliant, brave, witty, erect, strong in her presence, and elsewhere dull and
commonplace enough, illustrates the same principle. The true cake-walk as seen
in the South is perhaps the purest expression of this impulse to courtship antics
seen in man, but its irradiations are many and pervasive. The presence of the fair