Factor in Promoting Sociability.
The city man’s wife in the suburbs can visit her friends oftener and more quickly, and the facility of speedy movement has given to suburbanites the benefit of the last acts at the theatre and the opera, whereas, before the automobile, they missed them in order to catch the last train.
The benefit of clergy has been immeasurably enhanced by the automobile, which, also, in addition to being itself an educational agent, has employed its speed and facilities in economizing time to increase the attendance in the schools. There are districts in the United States where children can not reach school in time without the use of the automobile.
What the automobile does for the city dweller, in enabling him to see the last act at the theatre or hear the last act of the opera, it does for the people of the farm in enabling them to spare the time to attend dances, sociables, entertainments and motion picture shows. Where formerly the time required to drive a horse made it impossible to spare the time, now time is scarcely a factor. The change must inevitably react to the advantage and benefit of humanity, if all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
The health advantage of the automobile is a subject on which there is a difference of opinion among medics. The ordinary layman, however, is disposed to cast his verdict in its favor in this respect also. Some physicians have expressed the opinion that the only respect in which the automobile is noticeably not a benefit is in the matter of health. Some of them think it does not give people enough exercise, and that at the rate its use is increasing it will not be long before man loses his ability to use his legs!
It would be a catastrophe indeed if the human race, through the automobile, reverted to the condition when primitive man, according to the Darwinian theory, swung by his hairy arms from tree limb to tree limb, using his feet only as a stabilizer. But nobody, unless a writer for a newspaper Sunday magazine section, is likely to maintain this seriously, and he only pretends to be serious.
Whatever man loses in disuse of his legs by riding, as compared with walking, may be said to be made up for by his use of them on levers of automobiles and in the other exercise or operation of a car. The fresh air and the sunlight—the great outdoors—are the big health factors in motoring, and man will go on taking a chance to experience these and other delights the automobile has to give.