For instance, the children of your neighbours are likely to be the playmates of your own children, and the children of degenerate parents in the slum district of your city will possibly be the fellow-citizen partners of your own family. Again, when it is known that right or wrong nutrition of the body is the most important agent in forming character, in establishing predisposition to temperance or intemperance of living, including the desire for intoxicating stimulants, it is revealed to one that right nutrition of the community as a whole is an important factor in his own environment, as is self-care in the case of his own nourishment.
The moment a student of every-day philosophy starts the study of problems from the A.B.C. beginning of things, and to shape his study according to an A.B.C. sequence, each cause of inharmony is at once traced back to its first expression in himself and then to causes influenced by his environments.
If we find that the largest influences for good or bad originate with the right or wrong instruction of children during the home training or kindergarten period of their development, and that a dollar expended for education at that time is worth more for good than whole bancs of courts and whole armies of police to correct the effect of bad training and bad character later in life, it is quite logical to help promote the spread of the kindergarten or the kindergarten idea to include all of the children born into the world, and to furnish mothers and kindergarten teachers with knowledge relative to the right nutrition of their wards which they can themselves understand and can teach effectively to children.
If we also find that the influence of the kindergarten upon the parents of the infants is more potent than any other which can be brought to bear upon them, we see clearly that the way to secure the widest reform in the most thorough manner is to concentrate attention upon the kindergarten phase of education, advocate its extension to include even the last one of the children, beginning with the most needy first, and extending the care outward from the centre of worst neglect to finally reach the whole.
Experience in child saving so-called, and in child education on the kindergarten principle, has taught the cheapest and the most profitable way to insure an environment of good neighbours and profit-earning citizens; and investigation into the problem of human alimentation shows that a knowledge of the elements of an economic nutrition is the first essential of a family or school training; and also that this is most impressive when taught during the first ten years of life.
One cannot completely succeed in the study of menticulture from its A.B.C. beginning and in A.B.C. sequence without appreciation of the interrelation of the physical and the mental, the personal and the social, in attaining a complete mastery of the subject.
The author of the A.B.C. Life Series has pursued his study of the philosophy of life in experiences which have covered a great variety of occupations in many different parts of the world and among peoples of many different nations and races. His first book, "Menticulture," dealt with purging the mind and habits of sundry weaknesses and deterrents which have possession of people in general in some degree. He recognised the depressing effect of anger and worry and other phases of fearthought. In the book "Happiness," which followed next in order, fearthought was shown to be the unprofitable element of forethought. The influence of environment on each individual was revealed as an important factor of happiness, or the reverse, by means of an accidental encounter with a neglected waif in the busy streets of Chicago during a period of intense national excitement incident to the war with Spain, and this led to the publication of "That Last Waif; or, Social Quarantine." During the time that this last book was being written, attention to the importance of right nutrition was invited by personal disabilities, and the experiments described in "Glutton or Epicure; or, Economic Nutrition" were begun and have continued until now.
In the study of the latter, but most important factor in profitable living, circumstances have greatly favoured the author, as related in his latest book, "The A.B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition."
The almost phenomenal circulation of "Menticulture" for a book of its kind, and a somewhat smaller interest in the books on nutrition and the appeal for better care of the waifs of society, showed that most persons wished, like the author, to find a short cut to happiness by means of indifference to environment, both internal and external, while habitually sinning against the physiological dietetic requirements of Nature. In smothering worry and guarding against anger the psychic assistance of digestion was stimulated and some better results were thereby obtained, but not the best attainable results.
Living is easy and life may be made constantly happy by beginning right; and the right beginning is none other than the careful feeding of the body. This done there is an enormous reserve of energy, a naturally optimistic train of thought, a charitable attitude towards everybody, and a loving appreciation of everything that God has made. Morbidity of temperament will disappear from an organism that is economically and rightly nourished, and death will cease to have any terrors for such; and as fear of death is the worst depressant known, many of the worries of existence take their everlasting flight from the atmosphere of the rightly nourished.
The wide interest now prevalent in the subjects treated in The A.B.C. Life Series is evidenced by the scientific, military, and lay activity, in connection with the experiments at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University and elsewhere, as related in the "A.B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition" and in "The New Glutton or Epicure" of the series.
The general application is more fully shown, however, by the indorsement of the great Battle Creek Sanitarium, which practically studies all phases of the subject, from health conservation and child saving to general missionary work in social reform.
HORACE FLETCHER.
PREFACE
"And a little child shall lead them."
The text of this appeal was furnished by the accidental observation of a waif of not more than four years of age, who was gathered into the meshes of the law, and then pushed back into a stifling atmosphere of criminal neglect under ban of the official sentence, "Now get! you little bastard, and to hell with you!"
This waif disappeared into the slums without leaving any clue to his identity, and without any certainty of rescue, except by means of a quickened public conscience that shall organize to mend the existing defects arising from our careless lack of system in child protection, so as to rescue all waifs in need, in order to include the lost waif of our story.
The development of the day-nursery and kindergarten methods of child care and character-building has proven that ninety-eight per cent., at least, of the formerly-considered "hopelessly submerged ten per cent. stratum of society" can be saved and added to the mass of good citizenship by these means, and that the insignificant few, abnormally weak or perverse, are better subjects for industrial schools before criminal tendencies develop into habit, than for street schools of aimlessness and resultant crime.
Hope of success in exciting pity and justice for the victims of neglect and persecution within our gates is nourished by the evidence of that strong national sympathy for persecuted and neglected humanity which caused the sacrifice of war for the relief of our suffering neighbors in the island of Cuba. The same strength of purpose and thoroughness of aim—at one-twentieth of the cost, applied to a profitable investment instead—would free our fair land of the last vestige of the neglect which now breeds ceaseless crime.
The spirit of reform is awake to the demands of present civilized ideals. What we are willing to do for the reconcentrados of Cuba, let us do for our own defenseless