=Physical training.=—­Seeing that it is so difficult to find a man or a woman among our people who has attained physical perfection, it behooves society and the schools to take a critical inventory of their methods of physical training and their meager accomplishments as a preliminary survey looking to a change in our procedure.  We seem to have delegated scientific physical training to athletics and pugilism, with but scant concern for our people as a whole.  If pink-tea calisthenics as practiced mildly in our schools has failed to produce robust bodies, then it is incumbent upon us to adopt a regime of beefsteak.  What the traditional school has failed to do the vitalized school must attempt to do or suffer the humiliation of striking its colors.  There is no middle course; it must either win a victory or admit defeat in common with the traditional school.  The standard is high, of course, but every standard of the vitalized school is and ought to be high.

=Cigarettes.=—­If the use of cigarettes is devitalizing our boys, and this can be determined, then the manufacture and sale must be prohibited unless our legislative bodies would plead guilty to the charge of impotence.  But we are told that public sentiment conditions the enactment of laws.  If such be the case, then the school and its auxiliaries should feel it a duty to generate public sentiment.  If cigarettes are harmful, then they should be banished, and the task is not an impossible one by any means.  As to the injurious effects of cigarettes, as distinguished an authority as Thomas A. Edison says the following: 

“The injurious agent in cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper.  The substance thereby formed is called ‘acrolein.’  It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys.  Unlike most narcotics, this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable.  I employ no person who smokes cigarettes.”

We have eliminated dangerous explosives from our Fourth of July celebrations, and the ban can as easily be placed upon any other dangerous product.  Just here we inevitably meet the cry of paternalism, but we shall always be confronted by the question to what extent the government should stand aside and see its citizens follow the bent of their appetites and passions over the brink of destruction.  It is the inherent right of government to maintain its own integrity, and this it can do only through the conservation of the powers of its citizens.  If paternalism is necessary to this end, then paternalism is a governmental virtue.  Better, by far, some paternalism than a race of weaklings.