DIRT.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIII, Issue 1388, 21 November 1918, Page 7

DIRT.

All tlio ancient peoples, from the Persians to the Irish, seem to have been notorious bathers, writes the .New Statesman. According to Dr. Joyce, the Irish bathed everyday. On tlioof.i.r band, the Brchon laws, in laying- down the duties of a son to an ageing father, only provided for the old man being gi en a bath every twentieth night, though his head was to be washed every Saturday. It is. probable, however, that the Romans wore the world’s greatest bathers until modern limes. At least no other people turned bathing into a. luxury and an amusement as the Romans did. It is said to reflect that bathing was far more popular in the age of Nero than in the age of Shakespeare. Nero courted popularity by building baths. Queen Elizabeth could hardly have won the hearts of her people in that way. At the same tune soap was made in London as early as 1524, and public baf.h s did exist. But wo do not think of the Elizabethans as immoderate washers.

Perhaps we are inclined to exaggerate the dirtiness of human beings between the time of the Romans and that of the Victorians We have the record of various saints who regarded bodily cleanliness as akin to vice, and wo have keen led to regard dirt as the universal characteristic of the Middle Ages. One thing is certain. The Christians had good ground for associating cleanliness with the evil one. The public baths had become bagnios, and St. Anthony himself would not have been safe in them. Bathing had become not only a pleasure, but a pleasure •associated with the extreme of immorality. Hence the Christians ordered their followers to bathe, if they would, for the sake of cleanliness, and not for (he love of amusement. On the other hand, there is no denying that many of the early Christians despised the human Ixxly to tin; point of making a Cinderella of it. The suspicion of the hath as u luxury survives even to the pre? n nt day. There are Sabbatarian seaside places where-—at least, until yesterday—it was thought to be a breach of God’s law to bathe on a Sunday. Nor is it only Puritans who distrust the bath. To road a description of the hath h s it is used in a convent school u to realise that Puritan and Catholic alike feel this ancient distrust. On tho other hand, the average modern Englishman is inclined to believe that, in taking a bath, he is performing a fine moral action. Someone lias called him a Pharisee with a cake of soap, and ho is unquestionably too easily led into looking down on foreigners as belonging to a dirtior-bodiod race than his own He forgets that probably the greatest of his countrymen have borne less resemblance to himself than Dr. Johnson, who confessed that he had no passion for clean linen. Neither tho cold tub nor the bathe in the sea, has a history in Great Britain further hack than the eighteenth century. It is doubtful whether Shakespeare used a tooth-brush. Cleanliness appears to have had its origin in superstition. Men bathed themselves as a, symbol long before they bathed themselves as a habit. Similarly, man learned his first lesson in sanitation not from any understanding of the laws of health, but from his fear of magicians being able to injure him by means of his excrements. Few of us realise what a debt wo owe to superstition. Wo aro told that even in Porto Novo, in Dahomey, the streets used to be swept once a year as a part of the ceremony of tho expulsion of death from the town. “The streets wore carefully swept, and all the filth which usually encumbered them was removed, ‘lost death should there hud a refuge.’ ” Superstition lias anticipated reason in almost all the ritual of hygiene. To-day, we know, there are still doctors to be found who believe that cleanliness is something of a superstition. Did not Sir Almroth Wright toll us a few years ago that wc washed too much? It is only a month or two since wc heard a young doctor contending that most of our epidemics have little relation to insanitary conditions, us they often break out in the “better ciass" neighbourhoods. Wo aro determined in this matter to hold fast to our superstition. Wc are sure the world cannot with safety relapse into uncleanlincss. Wo like tho continual washing of hands. Wc only wish it were a universal habit among cooks and waitresses and other people who handle our food, .