Maintaining Health

Health is the most valuable of all possessions, for with health one can attain anything else within reason. A few of the great people of the world have been sickly, but it takes men and women sound in body and mind to do the important work. Healthy men and women are a nation's most valuable asset.

It is natural to be healthy, but we have wandered so far astray that disease is the rule and good health the exception. Of course, most people are well enough to attend to their work, but nearly all are suffering from some ill, mental or physical, acute or chronic, which deprives them of a part of their power. The average individual is of less value to himself, to his family and to society than he could be. His bad habits, of which he is often not aware, have brought weakness and disease upon him. These conditions prevent him from doing his best mentally and physically.

This abnormal condition has a bad effect upon his descendants, who may not be born with any special defects, but they have less resistance at birth than is their due, and consequently fall prey to disease very easily. This state of impaired resistance has been passed on from generation to generation, and we of today are passing it on as a heritage to our children.

Under favorable conditions people should live in comfort and health to the age of one hundred years or more, useful and in full possession of their faculties. Barring accidents, which should be less numerous when people fully realize that unreasonable haste and speed are wasteful and that life is more valuable than accumulated wealth, human life could and should be a certainty. There should be no sudden deaths resulting from the popular diseases of today. In fact, pneumonia, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, cancer and various other ills that are fatal to the vast majority of the race, should and could be abolished. This may sound idealistic, but though such results are not probable in the near future, they are possible.

All civilized nations of which we have record, except the Chinese, have decayed after growing and flourishing a few centuries, usually about a thousand years or less. Many reasons are given for the decline and fall of nations. Rome especially furnishes food for much thought. However, look into the history of each known nation that has risen to prominence, glory and power, and you will find that so long as they kept in close contact with the soil they flourished. With the advance of civilization the peoples change their mode of life from simplicity to luxuriousness and complexity. Thus individuals decay and in the end there is enough individual decay to result in national degeneration. When this process has advanced far enough these people are unable to hold their own. In the severe competition of nations the strain is too great and they perish. There is a point of refinement beyond which people can not go and survive.

From luxury nations are plunged into hardship. Then their renewed contact with the soil gradually causes their regeneration, if they have enough vitality left to rise again. Such is the history of the Italians. Many others, like the once great Egyptians, whose civilization was very far advanced and who became so dissolute that a virtuous woman was a curiosity, have been unable to recover, even after a lapse of many centuries. The degenerated nations are like diseased individuals: Some have gone so far on the road to ruin that they are doomed to die. Others can slowly regain their health by mending their ways.