The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1878-06-01

Any careful observer, passing along
our buster thoroughfares, or happening
into any country town on market day,
or anywhere else where men congre-
gate, can hardly have failed to notice
that while there are many strong ones,
and many hearty ones, there are very
few who are thoroughly erect or we'll
proportioned throughout. And when
It is remembered that the large majority
of men in this country are sons of farm
ers, merchants, mechanics, or lab0rers,
it is not difficult to account for this one
sidedness of build and Indifferent car
rage. For while the farmers work is
vigorous and in the open air, far the
greater part of it, and especially the
harder part of it, constantly uses his
back, and does but little for his front,
and particularly for the front of his
chest. Moving stoops him over and
rounds his back; 80 do spading, and
hoeing, and wedding, and lifting of
nearly every sort. His back grows
thick and strong, perhaps massive; so
do some of the muscles of his arms, of
his abdomen, and of his legs, until they
soon SO outstrip the others that his
spine, getting once crooked from being
so long and so firmly held in one posi-
ton, never gets out Of it day or night.
While his whole work strengthens, it
also stiffens him. He is seldom q good
walker, the habit of always hitcbing up,
though the errand is to place hardly q
mile away, contributing to this stiffness,
found, as it usually is, with an inerect po-
sition as he rides, so unlike, by-the-way,
that which is so common among the En-
glish stage-drivers, who elected praise
from Emerson for their digni6ed grand
fatherly air.
Few of the mechanic arts are any
more favorable to symmetrical develop
ment and uprightness of carriage. The
blacksmith, like the farmer, works some
muscles tremendously; those Of his
hands, of one of his shoulders, and of
one of his arms, for instance; but his
legs are often Indifferent, and his loins
nothing great, while, in common with
hosts Of mechanics, his work is not done
in the open air. Painters and plasterers
have good wrists: carpenters plane and
saw and drive nails well with their right
hands; masons, with backs bent, lift
heavy stones, which, with one of their
hands, they have chiseled into shape for
their purpose; shoe-makers hoop their
backs rather more successfully than any
other trade; and the jewelers., compos-
itors, designers, and all who do the
finer, lighter work, would never, merely
by their daily toll, develop into we'll
built, erect men, if they kept it for a
thousand years. Men in mercantile life
sit or stand many hours each day, are
frequently burdened with important and
trying work, have so many irons in the
fire as to get no rest, and at the end OF
the day find themselves thoroughly ex-
hausted, and in humor for any thing but
vigorous muscular exertiOn. If their
work calls them out much, it uses their
legs only, leaving the arms idle, and so
keeping the development but partial.
The spade, the pick, and the bar of the
laboring man keep him stopped over in
spite of all he can do, and he lives
and dies, as Charles Reade de-
scribed him in his admirable sketch of
the brave blind swimmer of the Scottish
firth, James Lambert-a man with a
SLOUGH in his gait.-William Blaikie, in
Harper's Magazine for May.