FRESH AIR DAY AND NIGHT, WITH NOURISHING FOOD AND PLENTY OF IT, WILL KEEP YOU FREE FROM CONSUMPTION. These conditions will cure you in the first stages.
It is very important, however, that the boy whose parents died from consumption should not follow any trade or vocation which keeps him indoors during the growing period of his life. He never should take up any employment which means living in a dusty atmosphere, where metal filings are floating in the air. Keep out of button factories. The dust from the old bones used to make buttons and similar articles is apt to irritate the lungs, and when this condition is brought about the germs of consumption find a ready soil to breed in, and they do so.
You need have no fear of consumption if you follow the rule of keeping your lungs clean; fresh air is the broom for this kind of cleaning.
The curse of the public dance halls is not known to you all. I do not speak of the immoral conditions surrounding many of these places, but of the physical conditions. You cannot frequent these poorly-ventilated halls without having poisons circulated in your brains. If you are studying to perfect yourself in some vocation which calls for a perfect adjustment between the brain and hands; if your work calls for the keenest eyesight or acutest form of hearing; the edge will be taken off these tools should you spend your nights where the air is foul, where the skins of careless and ignorant persons are giving off their poisons, where the dust brought in by skirts is swirled in the atmosphere by the dancing crowd.
There is no doubt in my mind that many a boy is started on a career of “laziness,” incapacity and unhealth from the constant intake of poisonous matter always to be found up in the gods’ gallery. Foul and hot air exhaled from the lungs always rises upward, so a boy sitting in the gallery really has his lungs over a vast pit which sends up rank poisons for him to take into his system. Indirectly this leads to drink, for with a headache, a feeling of weakness and sometimes a dizziness he, at first, takes a little beer. From this to ale and then liquor is the easy path. What can we expect from the brain of such a youth? Nothing――that is, nothing good. So at the start of a useless boy and ofttimes criminal, we see it was not vicious tendencies nor criminal instincts, but vicious air which brought about a poisoned brain and this results in a wrong view of things, so the youth takes to anything but real work.