started work. To begin with, they had probably better food. Then in most cases they were out more than before in the open air, and this tells favourably in one way on the newsboys. But even then it does not prevent the physique as a whole from declining steadily. The boy is a walker, a runner, a carrier. To walk, to run, to carry as free exercise is good—but as work it spells mere blight and loss. It was, by the aid, not of feet but of hands, that human life was grasped; the slowly opened hand made the invisible path. It forged far ahead, and pierced the narrow horizon of the brute. And the organism, in a sense, knows when the upward movement is checked, when the future that was won is lost. No spring will revive the ambition of the finished hooligan. It seems that Nature has fixed the seasons of human growth as she has fixed the seasons of animal growth, that it takes longer to become a man than a beast, and longer to become a civilized man than a savage (besides which the savage has more time freely given him).[1] It is possible in a garden to get to know what to expect at different seasons. So it is possible in the school
- ↑ Thus the boys of New Guinea, for example, are not hindered from making things. They rig up tents, build rude boats, make sails and bows and arrows, and are as active in wood and wild as was Robinson Crusoe.
