not yet learned to appeal to the more virile qualities. Fielding Hall[14] asks why
Christ and Buddha alone of great religious teachers were rejected by their own
race and accepted elsewhere. He answers that these mild beliefs of peace,
nonresistance, and submission, rejected by virile warrior races, Jews and ancient
Hindus, were adopted where women were free and led in these matters.
Confucianism, Mohammedanism, etc., are virile, and so indigenous, and in such
forms of faith and worship women have small place. This again suggests how
the sex that rules the heart controls men.
Too much can hardly be said in favor of cold baths and swimming at this age.
Marro[15] quotes Father Kneipp, and almost rivals his hydrotherapeutic
enthusiasm. Cold bathing sends the blood inward partly by the cold which
contracts the capillaries of the skin and tissue immediately underlying it, and
partly by the pressure of the water over all the dermal surface, quickens the
activity of kidneys, lungs, and digestive apparatus, and the reactive glow is the
best possible tonic for dermal circulation. It is the best of all gymnastics for the
nonstriated or involuntary muscles and for the heart and blood vessels. This and
the removal of the products of excretion preserve all the important dermal
functions which are so easily and so often impaired in modern life, lessen the
liability to skin diseases, promote freshness of complexion; and the moral effects
of plunging into cold and supporting the body in deep water is not
inconsiderable in strengthening a spirit of hardihood and reducing
overtenderness to sensory discomforts. The exercise of swimming is unique in
that nearly all the movements and combinations are such as are rarely used
otherwise, and are perhaps in a sense ancestral and liberal rather than directly
preparatory for future avocations. Its stimulus for heart and lungs is, by general
consent of all writers upon the subject, most wholesome and beneficial. Nothing
so directly or quickly reduces to the lowest point the plethora of the sex organs.
The very absence of clothes and running on the beach is exhilarating and gives a
sense of freedom. Where practicable it is well to dispense with bathing suits,
even the scantiest. The warm bath tub is enfeebling and degenerative, despite the
cold spray later, while the free swim in cold water is most invigorating.
Happily, city officials, teachers, and sanitarians are now slowly realizing the
great improvement in health and temper that comes from bathing and are
establishing beach and surf, spray, floating and plunge summer baths and
swimming pools; often providing instruction even in swimming in clothes,
undressing in the water, treading water, and rescue work, free as well as fee
days, bathing suits, and, in London, places for nude bathing after dark;