The normal animal in a normal environment functions normally; it lives its life according to its kind, eats its proper food, which nature supplies, and fights its struggle for existence with the elements and with its natural foes.

Not so man, who undoubtedly was once normal as an animal, but who was endowed with certain powers of mind that the other animals did not possess, and that have resulted in a wonderful mental evolution that has changed the environment and also affected the body, - advantageously in some respects as to its capabilities, its deftness, its cleverness, but that has not as yet generally bettered its health.

Primitive man lived in an entirely different environment from our present surroundings, an environment that differed mostly in that it was a direct contact with nature; he was out in the open air most of the time, air that was uncontaminated by dust or smoke or any of the foul odors that civilization is constantly manufacturing; his body was free to move, because unhampered by clothing; his entire existence was one of physical activity, and we can logically conclude that most of this activity was of a healthful nature.

This is not saying that many of the things that we have today and that are the result of centuries of evolution in the making and using of tools are not desirable. But here is the idea: civilized man has divorced himself from nature, has put his feet in a leather box and covered his body with clothing, has built houses and shops, and is now living a "shut-in" life, shut in from the healthful outdoor air and contact with nature. And as a result, civilized man is living on an average about thirty-five years, and is sick a good deal of this time.

It is a sad commentary on the present age to say that there are thousands of children born in city slums who never see a spear of green grass, a flower or a tree, and who only occasionally get a glimpse of the blue sky through the dense clouds of city smoke. These children are the victims of environment, which moulds their young lives into ways of vice and crime, and disease is a natural result of their enforced separation from nature; even the savage of the forest had a better chance in the struggle for existence than they can ever hope to have.

To go to people in this situation and teach them that they should breathe pure air and live normal human lives is to add insult to injury. And this is largely true of millions of members of the working class who are "sentenced for life" by the present industrial order to live beneath the surface of the earth, or in foulsmelling packing-house districts, or crowded in unsanitary factories, or in some way to spend their lives in nerve-racking and body-destroying toil.

To tell a man he should eat "pure food" helps him very little when his financial resources enable him to procure only the cheapest kind of food, and most of this adulterated with something cheaper.

The individual must ever be largely controlled by his environment, which will unquestionably tend to mould his life into certain restricted channels of occupation, and limit his mental horizon to a sphere not much greater than this physical limitations. The man whose life from early childhood consists in getting up early in the morning and going to work, tending a machine all day until physically exhausted, and going home for food and sleep, to enable him to get up again in the morning and go to work, can not be said to live at all; he merely exists for the purpose of exploitation.

Should he cultivate habits that are vile, should he drink and chew and smoke and swear and be bestial, who is to blame? Has not his environment been a hotbed for the development of abnormal habits and appetites that logically go with an abnormal life?

My little message, "How to Live a Hundred Years," will never penetrate into the depths and reach the victims of our present industrial order, not at least as long as they are "the victims," though the day of freedom has been heralded and the writing is on the wall. No civilization is worthy of the name that pays so little attention to the safeguarding of the life of its citizenship as ours, nor can an industrial system that fairly reeks with wrongs to those who toil, perpetuate itself indefinitely, even though millions of the workers are crushed beneath the point of resistance and accept without protest whatever they can get to keep body and soul together.

Could I personally go to each victim of Mammon and teach him that by right living he could live one hundred years (the task would be indeed a stupendous one), after a conviction had been secured, few would care to prolong their miserable existence even one hundred days.

Life has become a burden to millions of people under the present capitalistic régime, so much so that many thousands end it. The papers are full of accounts of suicide, though scientists tell us that the "love of life is the strongest passion of the race."

In spite of the fact that occasionally some soul wiggles its way up through the muck and filth of a hostile environment, the natural law is that the majority will be subjugated by the environment. Individual man is largely the creature of his environment; it is collective man only who is the creator of environment.

It is collective man who has created the city and its slums, the workshops, the mills, and the mines. It is collective man who has created the political state, and the industrial system known today as capitalism, which uses the political state as a means of enforcing its industrial régime. It is collective man who can change what he has created or recreate anew a better industrial state founded on broader principles, and taking into account the mental, moral, and physical welfare of all the component parts that go to make up the whole, society.

Until such a state is established the average length of years will undoubtedly keep on decreasing, even though at the present time there are thousands who are learning the secrets of how to live properly, and adding many years to their individual lives.

In spite of a hostile environment, an environment that should be changed by intelligent collective effort, it is possible for many to save themselves from early destruction, and eventually to save the race.

There is only one proper way to die, - of a ripe old age, like the ripe peach falls from the tree. Any person who dies younger than one hundred years is a victim either to the adverse environment of the age in which we live, or else to ignorance, which may easily result from a wrong environment.

For all that, having the knowledge that this little book has given you, there is no longer any excuse for you, as an individual, to continue to live in a way that is destructive of your physical body. You may not be able to undo all the wrongs of the past, but you can at least stop murdering yourself and live right from this on. You can easily add ten, twenty, or forty years to your life by right living, even in the midst of a hostile environment; and you can do better than that, you can become a definite factor in changing that environment and helping not only to free yourself but all mankind.

If this book has started you to thinking along the line of "right living," it has served the purpose of the author. If you feel that you have received any benefit from the ideas expressed herein, he will be greatly pleased to have you pass them along to some person whom you think may be interested.

If you should be induced to practice some of the suggestions, such as the no-breakfast plan, raw food diet, or fasting as hereinbefore explained, the author will be very glad to have a personal letter from you giving the results of your experiment, which experiment should be sufficiently long to make it worthy of the name. He will not promise to answer such letters, which will not be necessary, but this information may be later compiled so as to assist others in reaching a logical conclusion as to the merits of the theories put forth, which are briefly summarized as follows:

That we should return as much as possible to a natural way of living, spending all the time we can out in the open air and breathing copiously. That we should sleep in the open, or at least with windows wide open, even in the winter time. That we should eat moderately, not over two meals a day, and that fruit and nuts should be our main food instead of meat. That uncooked food is better than cooked, and that the appetite should not be pandered to. That disease is a result of some cause, and that generally the cause is in wrong methods of living. That the removal of the cause is the first step in the cure of disease, and that nature will do the rest if given an opportunity to clean out the system, and that fasting affords this opportunity, while medicine adds new burdens and undesirable complications. That the people must learn to take care of their own health, and that the doctors' position in modern society is such that it is against their economic interest to teach people how to live free from disease, and they can not be expected to destroy their own "business." That much that is wrong exists in the environment and that the environment can be changed by cooperative action.

Logically, the sensible thing to do, if you wish to live one hundred years, is to start at once to live in accordance with nature's laws, to be intellectually, morally, and physically clean, both inside and out. Next, to help to change the environment so that it will be conducive to the highest unfoldment of all the faculties of body, intellect, and soul, not of yourself alone, but of every child born into this world In this way shall we realize a broader individual life and make possible the coming of the Brotherhood of Man.