rge of the body waste, and
so led to dulling of the reflex which promotes defecation. We are only
just beginning to realize how serious are the consequences.

[Sidenote: "Remedies" that are Worse than the Evils]

We have described many of the unhygienic practises common to-day as
direct results of upsetting Nature's equilibrium. Others are indirect
results. These latter practises may be described as attempts to remedy
the evils of the former, the "remedies," however, being often worse than
the diseases. Much of our drugging, some of our wrong food habits and
not a little of our immorality are simply crude and unscientific
attempts to compensate for disturbances or deviations from a normal
life. We wake ourselves up, as it were, with caffein, move our bowels
with a cathartic, induce an appetite with a cocktail, seek rest from the
day's fatigue and worries in nicotin, and put ourselves to sleep with an
opiate. In these practises we are evidently trying in wrong ways to
compensate respectively for insufficient sleep, insufficient
peristalsis, indigestion, overfatigue, and insomnia--evils due, as
previously explained, to upsetting Nature's balance, between work,
play, rest and sleep.

So also our overeating is largely an unscientific effort to compensate
for overconcentration of diet,--that is, an effort to get bulk. Again,
too much protein is in large measure due to the need of compensating for
rapid eating, for as has been remarked, protein is the one kind of food
which can be eaten fast with impunity.

Again, a large part of our moral derelictions is due to an unbalanced
life from which amusements are largely omitted. The "bad" boy in the
city streets is usually following his instinct for amusement, of which
the lack of playgrounds has deprived him. Dissipations of many kinds are
explained in a similar way. It is largely because workmen are so often
drudges and lack normal recreations that they seek amusement in the
concentrated form they find in saloons, gambling places, dives and dance
halls.

Finally those economic and social conditions of civilization which have
resulted in deferring marriage beyond the best physiological age, lie
behind prostitution and its terrible train of consequences including the
venereal diseases.

The worst of it is that these wrong remedies, instead of helping,
aggravate the disease. They become part of a vicious circle, which
continues in an endless round.

[Sidenote: Shortened Hum