For unnumbered generations primitive man in the nomad age wandered, made perhaps annual migrations, and bore heavy burdens, while we ride relatively unencumbered. He tilled the reluctant soil, digging with rude implements where we use machines of many man-power. In the stone, iron, and bronze age, he shaped stone and metals, and wrought with infinite pains and effort, products that we buy without even knowledge of the processes by which they are made. As hunter he followed game, which, when found, he chased, fought, and overcame in a struggle perhaps desperate, while we shoot it at a distance with little risk or effort. In warfare he fought hand to hand and eye to eye, while we kill "with as much black powder as can be put in a woman's thimble." He caught and domesticated scores of species of wild animals and taught them to serve him; fished with patience and skill that compensated his crude tools, weapons, implements, and tackle; danced to exhaustion in the service of his gods or in memory of his forebears imitating every animal, rehearsing all his own activities in mimic form to the point of exhaustion, while we move through a few figures in closed spaces. He dressed hides, wove baskets which we can not reproduce, and fabrics which we only poorly imitate by machinery, made pottery which set our fashions, played games that invigorated body and soul. His courtship was with feats of prowess and skill, and meant physical effort and endurance.
Adolescent girls, especially in the middle classes, in upper grammar and high school grades, during the golden age for nascent muscular development, suffer perhaps most of all in this respect. Grave as are the evils of child labor, I believe far more pubescents in this country now suffer from too little than from too much physical exercise, while most who suffer from work do so because it is too uniform, one-sided, accessory, or performed under unwholesome conditions, and not because it is excessive in amount. Modern industry has thus largely ceased to be a means of physical development and needs to be offset by compensating modes of activity. Many labor-saving devices increase neural strain, so that one of the problems of our time is how to preserve and restore nerve energy. Under present industrial systems this must grow worse and not better in the future. Healthy natural industries will be less and less open to the young. This is the new situation that now confronts those concerned for motor education, if they would only make good what is lost.