Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PHYSICAL EFFICIENCY CHAPTER I MEANING AND IMPORTANCE OF PHYSICAL EFFICIENCY Bv physical efficiency is meant the fitness of men and women for their life’s work. It matters not what the work may be, the maintenance of the physical powers of the individual is the all-important element in the national asset. In its widest sense physical efficiency implies both bodily and mental efficiency; for although physically unfit persons do occasionally exhibit mental powers of a high, it may be of the highest, order, the continuance of the species will not be of them nor of such as they. The physical and moral health of the people is the all-important factor in a nation’s welfare; all other considerations are merely details of policy. Governments come and go, monarchies fall andrepublics rise, even religions and religious beliefs alter, but the soundness of the people physically and morally is the essence of national being. It is therefore no ephemeral question which at present concerns us, for it is none other than our continued existence as a virile race. Public Anxiety Regarding National Physique. That the possibility of physical degeneration has taken hold, justifiably or otherwise, upon the minds of British folk, there is abundant evidence; the subject is well-nigh in every one’s thoughts, and many have written convincingly upon it. Not only in Britain, but in several other countries, the health- standard of the people is causing anxiety; and, for the first time in the history of the British people, the subject has lately been seriously considered by two Royal Commissions. Both of these inquiries practically resolved themselves into a question of the physical degeneration of the people; and . although the findings of these commissions and of other investigating bod…