Note 128 — Chapter II · ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE.

Every library reading room ought to open on a garden where one could read and write on fine days in the open air. For all men whose labour is physical—for example, for a factory hand—the proper recreation is repose in the open air, and, if need be, intellectual labour in the open air. For men who work with their minds, the proper recreation is bodily exercise in the open air, in the sunlight. For children every holiday ought to be spent in the country. Lighted rooms, children’s entertainments in the house even on Sunday afternoons, theatrical representations, are, hygienically speaking, absurdities. All boarding-schools, moreover, ought to be beyond the city limits and if possible on some commanding height. If there existed in France, as in Germany for example, great colleges in country districts hard by forests, or still better, in the highlands of Dauphiny or the Pyrenees, such places would ultimately be adopted by the better classes for their children’s education, and thus might be combated the degeneracy of the middle class, which is so much more rapid in France than elsewhere, because the custom of restricting the number of children interferes with natural selection.