Strange to say, however, while most people seem to want to live as long as they can, and many are afraid to die, very few go anywhere near the limit of longevity, not one in a thousand passes the one-hundred-mile post.

Why is it that so few people die of old age?

The answer is twofold: one is that society does not know how properly to take care of its component parts, and the other is that the individuals, the component parts, do not know how to take care of themselves.

A great many people are killed by accidents.

Where one person kills himself through accident, a thousand people are killed by society; the toll of the railroads alone amounts to many thousands each year; the mills and factories kill people like flies, and the mines are veritable morgues. That most accidents are preventable is a plain statement of fact. In nearly every instance the hand of Greed is the cause of the harvest of Death. Just how to take the hand of Greed from the throat of Society is another question not to be discussed in these articles.

Running, as he does, such a risk of being killed by outside causes; taking his life in his hands, so to speak, every time he steps on board a railroad train or enters a shop or mine or factory, the individual should at least take proper precautions not to lose his life from "inside" causes wholly within the jurisdiction of the individual sphere of action.

Even though society be a perfect organism, instead of just a beginning, a mere suggestion of what it ought to be; even though every safeguard against accident be applied, and every workshop made safe and sanitary, this would not necessarily mean that disease, sickness, and pain would be banished from the realm of the individual's internal anatomy.

The man who blames society for things that are the result of his own ignorance is playing the baby act. Society has enough to answer for without trying to make her responsible for your sins.

When something goes wrong, it is a common habit to pass the blame along to the "other fellow." A great many "blames" can be placed at the door of society, and that means the other fellow; but a great many more "blames," when it comes to the question of physical health, need not be passed along; they should properly lodge with the individual who is sick.

Health is the normal state. If your body is not well, there is some definite reason, some cause for your being diseased - out of ease, unwell, and in nine cases out of ten the removal of the cause will effect a cure.

Any machine to run properly must be clean, well oiled, with no parts out of adjustment. Any body to run smoothly, to obey the master mind with precision and despatch, must be likewise clean, well nourished and with no parts out of ease, or dis-eased.

A gasoline engine requires water, lubricating oil, gasoline, and air instead of food; these are vitalized into life by an electric spark. With a proper mixture of air and gasoline, proper lubrication, cooling, and a fat spark, an engine will run smoothly and continuously until the natural and unavoidable wear brings it to old age and decay. Let the lubricating oil give out and the cylinders are soon cut to pieces. Let the water give out and the engine soon becomes overheated. Let the gas or spark give out and the engine must inevitably stop. Feed too much lubricating oil and the engine becomes foul, soot accumulates in the cylinders and soon the spark plugs are covered and the engine misses its strokes and eventually stops. Feed too much or too little air and the engine will run unevenly and without power, if at all. The entire mechanism requires careful adjustment and a proper regulation of its "food" supply; the result is a smooth, even, and powerful stroke of the piston that sends the wheels revolving with irresistible force.

The human body should be viewed as a machine, an instrument through which the soul manifests. The soul might be likened to the electric spark from the battery or magnito that supplies the life to the machine and vitalizes it into action.

Without proper food, clothing, and shelter this human body must get out of ease, or diseased. But food, clothing, and shelter are not all that the body needs; with all these things it can become diseased through the power of the mind, for it is a more delicate mechanism than the engine of steel, and it is responsive to more than mere physical substances. With a perfect adjustment of food, clothing, and shelter, and a wrong mental attitude this wonderful machine would soon be out of running order. The mind has the power to make the body sick or to keep the body well, for the mind can and must regulate not only the food, clothing, shelter, exercise, etc., but also the thought waves of health, disease, hope, fear, joy, sadness, anger, envy, despondency. All these varied vibrations play upon the sensitive body, quicken its different organs to action, cause the blood to rush to the brain, the heart, or the stomach, cause perspiration to come to the surface of the body, the face to flush, the feet to grow cold, or any of the various manifestations that come merely as a response to mental impulses.

Outdoor life the hope of health.
Outdoor Life The Hope Of Health

If you can once get the proper viewpoint concerning your body, as a delicate mechanism which you are to run much as a machine, though a mechanism so wonderful that the most complicated machine that man has ever built is but a child's toy in comparison; that this body of yours must be cared for, fed, clothed, sheltered, and mentally nourished and directed along right channels of manifestation; you will find that if you have not perfect health there is some good reason for its lack.

In the rules I am going to give you I will present nothing new. For many centuries wise men have regulated their lives thereby, but the masses of the people have been slow to accept, though in recent years great progress is being made along proper lines.

The average man today uses the body as a means of physical gratification of the appetite and "lusts of the flesh"; a great feast is his ideal of a "good time," and not a few think they are having a good time when they have paralyzed the brain with intoxicating drink and descended to a plane lower than the beast. All manner of poisons are used to lull the body into a state of partial paralysis - tobacco, opium, morphine - millions of dollars are spent in their production, and millions of lives are made waste by their use.

In spite of the fact that we call this a civilized age, it is in reality far from a state of high mental unfoldment; the race still lives to eat, instead of eating to live. Intellectually the race is but a babe in swaddling clothes, we have much to learn concerning the simplest laws of health.

Look at the situation: hundreds of thousands of books have been written about diseases and how to cure them; thousands of colleges and medical schools are busy educating hundreds of thousands of men to cure disease; there is a drug store on every corner and a doctor's office in every business block, and a generous spattering of them in the residence districts; and still we are a nation of invalids. Nearly every man or woman you meet has an ache or a pain or a cough or a limp or a something-with-a-long-name-to-it the matter with him or her. Death walks boldly throughout the length and breadth of the land, his keen sickle ever red with the life-blood of countless victims - victims of ignorance and wrong methods of living.

A candid observer is forced to conclude that if it is really the business of doctors to cure disease, they are not making much headway; in fact, they are not keeping up with the procession, lame, halt and blind as it is.

The plain fact is that the doctor's "business" is not to cure disease, but to "doctor" it - and the unavoidable conclusion from this is that if people want to get well and stay well, it is about time they were understanding, not medicine, but the laws of health and hygiene. Once let right living walk in at the front door and the dope bottles will soon be found at the rear on the garbage heap - where they belong.

An ounce of prevention is worth a hundred weight of cure.

Did you ever stop and think, what would become of the physicians and hospitals and sanitariums and drug stores and undertakers, if an epidemic of health would sweep over this country? Did you ever stop to think that under the present industrial order it is to the immediate financial interest of a great many people that sickness and ill health continue?

When you have thought this all out it will be a matter of wonder to you, as it is to me, that so many doctors and nurses are actuated by the highest motives. And even when it comes to the venders of patent medicines and drugs, few of them free from the worst of poisons, you must remember that self preservation is the first law of physical life, and that the race is still groping its way towards the light.

Neither wonder that the true laws of health are not given to the world, only through obscure sources, reaching as yet but a few people, and actually taking effect upon a few of the few that are reached. It is so much easier to follow the crowd, to eat, drink and be merry, and die tomorrow, than to live the life of abstinence, the life of the soul instead of the life of the body.

Think these matters all over carefully for in what follows I have some simple rules of health for you that if you will observe them, will not only greatly lengthen the years of your physical life, but will make the mind supreme over the body and give the soul an instrument through which it can manifest with power and effect.