"A Common Health Sense Revolution Is Needed!"
A Call-to-Arms by . . . Dr. Herbert M. Shelton
The Earth swarms with compromisers and reformers, pushing their promising compromises and hopeful reforms. Many well-meaning women and men are working for the betterment of their fellowman and woman. Good-hearted philanthropists are busy with schemes to soften the evils of present-day life. They seek by various and sundry means to counteract the evils of modern society. Most of their schemes aim but to crop the branches from the great tree of evil. Few direct their missiles to its trunk. Fewer still recognize the need to apply the axe to the roots of the tree!
How very few appreciate the first principle, the starting point of every requirement for the solution of human problems is to go to the cause of the problem and eradicate there! "Reform! Reform!" they cry when a reform would never solve the problem. A thoroughgoing revolution is what is really needed! Superficial changes are not adequate. What is needed is a radical correction of evils. We need to go to the roots of evil and cut these away.
Who does not appreciate benevolence? But benevolence is not enough. It must be hitched to a basic program of reconstruction that rests upon a new and valid foundation a HEALTH revolution! No "mere reform" can lay a true foundation for a genuine solution of the many pressing problems with which the world is confronted today! The delusions of the world in matters of food, drink, "medicine," health, disease, and a host of other things must be uprooted, root and branch; and truth must supplant these delusions! ALWAYS AND FOREVER Truth is revolutionary! It is always thoroughgoing. It never stops at the surface, but truth alone goes to the heart and to the root of the problem.
Popular and professional delusions in "medicine" and health science cause three-quarters of human talent energies and capacities of mind and body to be either wasted or, worse than wasted, misapplied. Against these illusions, we must wage incessant war, both defensive and offensive war. But it is not enough that we wage war against individual illusions. It is essential that we penetrate to the root cause of the complex of illusions and apply the axe to this root. With simple Nature as our only authoritative teacher, we shall continue to oppose and expose all unnatural, anti-natural, and anti-vital means and measures and theories that are offered to The People. Fallacy whether contained in the teachings and theories of the learned, called "science" or in the unlearned, called "experience" must be exposed. The learned may write and talk so profoundly that nobody but the learned understand them. But to what purpose?
We Common Health Sense Revolutionists must continue to express the truths of Natural Hygiene in language that everybody can understand. Knowledge, if generally diffused, will wreck the systems based on ignorance. A spread of knowledge will bring about The Great American Health Revolution that, even now, seems long overdue. It will enable The People to understand the evils of the false systems and give them courage to abandon them. Natural Hygiene is a revolutionIST and not a mere reformist movement! It will sweep away old illusions and false systems and reconstruct human society on a normal, natural, Hygienic basis. This is a Common health Sense revolution that we should all work for in every way that we can. She is The Freewoman, and he is The Freeman whom "The Truth of Pure Natural Hygiene" sets free. And all are slaves beside.
