THE NEW RELIGION. "Be Strong, Quit You Like Men."

Free Lance, Volume III, Issue 120, 18 October 1902, Page 8

THE NEW RELIGION. "Be Strong, Quit You Like Men."

FLABBY muscles are out of fashion nowadays, just as surely as is the orthodox female " faint" so much used by ladies of a generation ago. The poor pallid person who upon being smitten hard on one cheek would request you to have a smite at the other side, has evanesced. The screeching mouse-frightened feminine shrieks less often, and throws flat-irons —an exertion that would have laid her grandmother up for a week, and caused the doctor to parade with his lancet to "let blood." It will be easily perceived that we were at the gymnastic exhibition given in the Opera House this week, and are impressed. • » • A person who may be pictured as having long snaky ringlets, a hectic flush, two pairs of stockings, and a muffler, recently wrote a column of eloquent reasons why the youthful New Zealander was on the physical down grade. The reasons were chiefly because the hectic person said so. Probably he had not seen a stage full of our Wellington youths, maidens, and grown men swell aggregate biceps capable of moving that person off this planet. » # » We know that the young men who are training their muscles m the gymnasiums of Wellington are, for the most part, highly educated and intelligent. The accusation from one quarter that the New Zealander was build ing up his muscle and crowding out his brain doesn't hold. We saw men whose muscles might have made a blacksmith envious, who never use any implement heavier than a pen wherewith to make a living, and whose intellects are as keen as their muscles are hard. We noticed a bank clerk doing " balancing " feats so easily that his comrades might well ask him for the " tip " for bank use ; and we noticed heaps of small boys and girls with their little chests expanded to the fullest extent, getting lung room and defying the wily microbe to find a weak spot to alight on. • • * What better training for the man of business than to learn how to use eye and hand with dexterity and ease ? What surer way of avoiding patent medicine pitfalls than to court athletic health ? It is the duty of parents to train their children physically as well as mentally, and a great many Wei-

lington paients are doing their duty. We noticed among those stalwart youths and maidens several members of medical men's families. The medical men don't want to be cramped in their operations by having to work professionally at home. It does not matter much who trains you physically, but it matters that you should be as physically fit as it is possible to be. It will keep y»>ur family plot vacant longer. You don't want to make life a misery by bursting the buttons off your waistcoat when you take a breath, but everyone should be able to smite quick and hard when smitten. • • • The Englishman of to-day is longer, wider, and heavier than ever he was. Flannelled fooling and muddied oafing may have had something to do with it, and gymnastics undoubtedly have. And brains of Britons have not deteriorated, although they are threatened by their advisers with extinction because they don't do the total business of the world. Get your muscle up. It will give your brain something to feed on. New Zealand wants brain, for she has to shove her way to the forefront of the nations, and it will take weight and wit to do it.