HEALTH AS AN INHERITANCE.
By Harper's Bazaar
YES, we all value health, and yet how we waste it! There is no way in which we do not disregard the rules that compass it. We read, for example, in the dark, and in bed, and in the cars, instead of waiting for light and quiet; we sit all day at work when we should vary the day with exercise; we eat in a hurry, as if we feared each morsel was to be snatched from us, when we should eat slowly and invoke the powers of digestion; we steal from sleep the hours that belong to that benign restorer of tired nature; we delight our gustatory nerves over banquets which millstones could not grind to digestion, and we drink draughts which inflame the stomach and set the brain on fire, and bring the body to naught. And when all is done we go about, if we are still able to go about, complaining that there is no health in us, and we blame fate and the divine laws when we have ourselves to blame and our ancestors. But the worst thing of all that we do is to so beggar our own stock and amount of health that we have none to give to our children, and we let them come into the world with impaired physical systems to begin with, and often let them run for luck in the care of those systems afterward. If we have no sense of the attention we should give our own health, if we neglect and injure our own bodies—those temples of the Spirit that deserve religious care—we have no right to take liberties with the bodies of others; but the moment that the health of the children intrusted to our care is injured, either by neglect, or by wrong indulgence, or by want of wisdom, we are culpable, for we not only rob those children of a birthright, but we rob also the whole race of which they and their descendants are a part, of that which is their portion, and which they have a right to expect, since health, in any normal state of society, should be as much the inheritance of a child as its mother's life-blood or its father's name.—Harper's Bazaar.