A CIVIC SENSE IN ENGLAND ? THE HYGIENE OF RECREATION.
BY DR. C. W. SALEEBY.
WE have attended to many aspects of industrial hygiene in this country. The young workers are protected against moving machinery, ventilation is provided, and so forth. They are in danger now no longer during their work, but during their play ; the hygienist is more concerned with what happens to them during their much extended and often deadly leisure than during their hours of arduous toil. The attempt to protect youth during its leisure is now called social hygiene in the United States—an admirable term, which we should employ here ; and a cardinal part of the five- fold " American plan " (employed no less in Canada) is the systematic provision of recreation for youth. This is regarded in North America as an essential part of the campaign against those agents to which, many years ago, I gave the name, now in general use, of racial poisons— foremost amongst which are alcohol and the venereal diseases.
The argument in a word is that since " youth must have its fling," let it fling a cricket ball. In four prolonged visits to Canada and the United States nothing has delighted me more than the extensive and emulous provision of facilities for recreation for youth of both sexes in all the cities which one visits. They vie with one another therein ; it is an expression of the civic patriotism in which North American cities contrast so markedly with our own. When Wimbledon comes round again, and we go to see the finest living exponents of one of the finest games in the world, which, like nearly all good games, was invented in England, we shall take a tempered delight, as usual, in American superiority, and I, for one, shall again reflect that such pre-eminence is inevitable, so long as American cities provide municipal tennis courts in such general abundance that natural fitness for the game can nowhere fail of its opportunity. They draw from all classes, we only from the privileged, and, of course, their chances of producing champions outvie ours.
Public health in this country, and particularly that practicable department of eugenics which we may call racial hygiene, require that we should protect parenthood by protecting the leisure of adolescence, which we now neglect as it has never been neglected in any time or place. We must rescue it from the unholy trinity of cities—Mammon, Bacchus and Priapus. One funda- mental—not accessory—way to help is to provide recrea- tion, which is a physio-psychological necessity for all, but especially the young. The work of the Y.M.C.A. during the War, and the policy of the Liquor Control Board, in providing places of play and amusement, such as cinemas, show how we may help adolescence—which may properly be called pre-parenthood, and upon which, therefore, the national and racial destiny depend—by making our Ministry of Health include a Department of Recreation, of play and pleasure and leisure, which serve life and health, instead of inviting the three chief enemies of life and health—tuberculosis, venereal disease and alcohol, of which the two latter are racial poisons, poison- ing the future when they poison adolescence.
That this is not merely theory, two examples may be cited to show. Colonel Harrison, the eminent authority, has published the figures of venereal disease in the Army over several decades, comparing the incidence in various centres, and has shown that marked decline has occurred in just those places, such as Aldershot, where provision for recreation has been made, and has directly followed such provision. Again, there is evidence from certain somewhat isolated camps during the War to show that total abstainers had a higher rate than their fellows of venereal disease, and investigation shows that in those camps the men were offered, for recreation, the wet canteen—or nothing. Self-excluded from the canteen, the abstainers had practically only one deplorable alterna- tive for their leisure. What a contrast to the admirable, generous and various provision of recreation for young American soldiers in their training camps in the States !
In truth, there are two alternatives for youth— recreation or dissipation. The words are extremely eloquent. The first—especially if we pronounce the first " e " long, and not as if the word meant wreck-reation- tells us that it refers to a process by which body and spirit are re-created after the fatigue and waste of past hours. True recreation does no less. It is not merely a mode of " letting off steam," nor merely a process of rehearsal for the stern activities of life, though psychologists have maintained both those views, from Schiller and Spencer to Groos, but it is a means of making body and spirit afresh, a true stimulant to nutrition and a necessity for complete living. The alternative is dissipation. Etymo- logists tell us that the second syllable probably means sweep. It is a process that sweeps asunder the powers and promises of the young life. Which do we provide for the young workers in our industrial cities after their day's work is done ? The answer is epitomized in the remark shouted from the back of the hall many years ago when I was addressing a temperance meeting in Manchester— that to get drunk is " the shortest way out of Man- chester."
If our cotton towns, for instance, are to compete indefinitely against those splendid new cities which one sees in the Southern States, with new factories, bright and clean, close to where the cotton is actually grown, cities without a saloon or a slum or coal smoke, where every street is lined with grass and trees, and where every youngster has swimming pools and tennis courts, and " community singing " always at his disposal—they must quickly provide something better than the public- house and the billiard table. The only tolerable thing in many of these cities is the cinema, the only streets fit to look at those shown on the screen in American plays ; but, though no one enjoys the cinema more than I do, my objection to it for youth—as to that other boon called " wireless "—is that its enjoyment is too passive. Recrea- tion should, for choice, be out of doors ; if indoors the best is something active, which exercises body and mind, and affords some measure of self-expression. " Commun- ity singing," now so extraordinarily popular and successful in North America, meets the need. But that is of no more use to the tone deaf than a cricket ground to the cripple ; our provision must be wide and various, and must avoid the mistake of trying to dictate to youth as to what it shall or shall not enjoy.
In our present smoke-spoilt cities the provision of recreation can be little better than a farce. Pure air to breathe and, above all, direct and undimmed sunlight, rich in those ultra-violet rays which smoke and window glass especially intercept—these are vital necessities. Even to don clean white flannels in our customary urban atmospheres is only to make the dirt around us more visible on our person. The joy of life is almost inacces- sible under such conditions. Failing the sunlight from without, what wonder that we ask to be " lit up " by toxic means within ? (None who have not visited North America, or Italy, for that matter, can realize how much easier is temperance where the sunlight makes natural euphoria possible.) In the corridor of a train surrounded by the usual double vista of smoking chimneys, I was informed by a fellow-traveller that " This is Sheffield. Mucky 'ole, isn't it ? " All our cities are " mucky 'oles," more's the pity. True recreation is well-nigh impossible within them. The industrial North must learn, as Essen and Cologne and Dusseldorf have learnt, and as I found in Pittsburg, that " where there's reek there's waste of brass." The proper use of coal, whether by distillation and combustion of its products as in Germany, or by the use of powdered coal, as largely in Pittsburg, is an indus- trial economy. It will involve some exertion on the part of capitalism, always too prone to play the part of the lazy Fafner—" Lass mir schlafen "—towards young Siegfried. The Yorkshire Post, quoted by Mrs. Williams- Ellis, talks nonsense when it suggests that smoke is a necessary concomitant of industrialism. It should visit modern America and Germany and Switzerland and learn better.
During many past years I have sought to show the physical advantages of sunlight, notably in the prevention and cure of what I call the diseases of darkness. Its psychical advantages, particularly for the recreation of youth, are no less, though perhaps less obviously definite. The restoration of sunlight to our malurbanized millions is the next great task of public health in this country.
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