The more we compare the condition of the people of the present with that of the people of the past, the more we dwell on a reasonable hope of better conditions in the future, the more dissatisfied we become with the condition in which we find ourselves. When the reason for all our past and present miseries shall have been fully revealed to us, we shall be in a position to enjoy still more the health and happiness that is in store for us. Should this world of ours come to an end in its present state, it would have to be pronounced a failure the same as a plant is a failure if it withers before coming to maturity.

Writing editorially, May 1856, Trall said: "Just so soon as the masses of people learn the great lessons that it is easier to keep health than to regain it; cheaper to prevent crime than to punish it; better to acquire knowledge than to suffer from ignorance and happier to be in peace and comity with our neighbors than in envious competition, just so soon will we have panagyriums in the place of jails, penitentiaries, grogshops, theatres, gambling halls, horse-racing, general trainings and, shall we say it ladies, tea parties!" In some places, he said, eating parties and tea-table scandals are all the amusements the females can find, while the males can only relieve the tedium of dull hours by resorting to the tavern or saloon and talking politics and puffing cigars.

We now think of the dawn of the day when the people shall know how to live without sickness. The laws of life are the great supporters of the great way of life and a sickly community is always weak in its obedience to the laws of being. "After all, we are too sick to live our own lives--not to repeat the stupid prejudices of each other--not to make our law the law of others." We have to create a proper environment for man's most enduring hope and no man's mind can rise above his physical deterioration.

Heredity gets the blame for anything that is not understood. If the individual is sick and the physician cannot ascribe a cause to the sickness, he can always blame it on heredity. In the April 1930 issue of the Review and Critique, Tilden tells of a little three-year-old girl who was brought to him from a great distance. He says that indigestion caused by scientific feeding had produced great acidity of the stomach and bowels. The mucous membrane of the child's vagina was excoriated from an acid leucorrhea, causing behavior that was distressing to both the parents and the physicians. "The severe itching was driving the child mad." He tells us that she "was continually trying to relieve herself by rubbing and scratching." Her physicians decided that the child was a "natural-born sex-pervert" and that she was "a very vicious abnormal child." Even the parents were accused of sex perversion, otherwise they could not have produced a child "cursed" as this one was.

The parents had carried out the advice to punish the child severely, but the punishment did not seem to do any good. How could it have relieved the intolerable itching and burning? What wonder that Dr. Tilden says he was filled with disgust when he heard the story of the "child's viciousness" and its inheritance from the parents. He says that he had seen other cases of this type, but he had never seen one that had been abused as this child had been.

With proper fasting, feeding and cleanliness, he says, within ten days the little patient had lost all of its diabolism--its proclivities for masturbation. Besides the fasting and simple feeding, he instructed the nurse to give vaginal douches of hot water, as hot as could be borne without doing injury, to cleanse the excoriated mucous surfaces. The child "soon became the idol of all who had the pleasure of knowing it." This was "after it was made happy by having its health restored." This simply means that as soon as the vaginal inflammation ended and the acid state of the digestive system was corrected, the child ceased to be a "sex-pervert." It is strange, says Tilden, "how satisfying unscientific treatment is. Remove cause and nature does the rest." Let the psychoanalyists take note.

The foregoing is an example of the suffering that grows out of wrong information and abuse, no matter how scientific these may be. The parents of the little girl were, perhaps, as loving as most parents are and did for the child the best that they knew. When love gives hurtful indulgence that results in sickness, that poisons the well-springs of life, it can cause as much suffering as studied abuse. My heart goes out to those whom the accidents of this world have thrown upon charity, and often a charity so unwise that its loving kindness is only a calamity.

Not only the child, but woman as well has been special victim of mankind's ignorance. She has been made a slave, not merely to man's greed, but also to his lust. Women especially are in need of health and strength. They are in need of knowledge of how to care for themselves.

She stood before the Hygienist, a beautiful ruin seeking for help. What could he do for her? If by any course of treatment, he could free her body of poisons, he could not by such means secure her against that mode of life which would reproduce the state of poisoning. Any system of medicine which deals with so-called remedies, whatever their kind, and which does not embrace physiology and a complete mental philosophy, will fail in nine cases out of ten in restoring health and will succeed only by chance in the other tenth.

He endeavored to make her understand the exceeding folly of still further taxing her diseased system with health-destroying substances--so-called medicines. With a mind exceedingly clear on most subjects, she was a child with respect to the economy of the human system, the laws of life and of healing. Like so many others, she looked to a physician when ill with as much faith as that with which the ancients consulted the oracles or the American Indian his medicine man. Though she failed always of receiving any lasting benefit, she had gone on trying old and new medicines and old and new physicians with a zeal worthy a better fate, with a faith that did not fail, because it was continually fed by hope. Men and women absurdly expect their physicians to create health for them while they themselves do nothing but manufacture disease. After searching for years through the medium of physicians and their pills, injections, wonder drugs, etc., she found what she had been looking for through the simple application of rest, fresh air, sunshine, pure water, wholesome food and a corrected way of life. There is no other way to return to health.

Hygiene did for her in ten months what medical treatment had failed to do in 15 years. She is a picture of health and beauty, her whole nature having undergone a change for the better. What will physicians say when they see what Hygiene--good, applied Hygiene--enabled her to do for herself in so short a time? The skill of the medical school had failed; let them account for the successes of Hygiene, if they can, on any ground that does not involve them in condemnation of their own failure.

As the people become more intelligent on physiological subjects, drugging grows less and less popular. The whole people are being affected through the influence of the small but growing number of Hygienists who are among them. Rapidly we are growing from a kindergarten to a kingdom. Upon us who have a knowledge of Hygiene and the glorious results it is capable of working in mankind falls the work of demonstrating its practical blessings, laying them kindly at the door of the humblest human habitation and shouting its message from the housetops, Its spread is our opportunity and our responsibility.

Even those of us who reject the dogma of man's total depravity cannot well reject that of total ignorance. Though not synonymous, the two words are twins. As light is the only remedy for darkness, so knowledge is the only remedy for ignorance. How many of us are prepared to consecrate our time, energies and talents to the promulgation of the glorious truths that are in our possession? How many of us are ready to become leaders? Those who have the heart to do it will find the work of educating the people a very noble work--grand, glorious and sublime!

Everywhere men are beginning to lose their faith in mere political reforms. They are beginning to discern that more radical changes are needed than those proposed by any of the party leaders--hence the growing interest in the various proposals for the social and economic reconstruction of society. The Hygienic reconstruction of society must form an integral part of that broader socio-economic reconstruction without which Hygiene in its glorious fullness is not possible. Man's urge to regain wholeness finds expression in the revolutionary cry for freedom from disease and suffering. Men have lived in a world of terror and darkness, but now the terror is being dissipated by Hygiene and when this is completed, there will be only sunshine.