I am very far from conceding that the vehement energy with which we do our work is due altogether to greed. We probably idle less and play less than any other race, and the absence of national habits of sport, especially in the West, leaves the man of business with no inducement to abandon that unceasing labor in which at last he finds his sole pleasure. He does not ride, or shoot, or fish, or play any game but euchre. Business absorbs him utterly, and at last he finds neither time nor desire for books. The newspaper is his sole literature; he has never had time to acquire a taste for any reading save his ledger. Honest friendship for books comes with youth or, as a rule, not at all. At last his hour of peril arrives. Then you may separate him from business, but you will find that to divorce his thoughts from it is impossible. The fiend of work he raised no man can lay. As to foreign travel, it wearies him. He has not the culture which makes it available or pleasant. Notwithstanding the plasticity of the American, he is now without resources. What then to advise I have asked myself countless times. Let him at least look to it that his boys go not the same evil road. The best business men are apt to think that their own successful careers represent the lives their children ought to follow, and that the four years of college spoil a lad for business. In reality these years, be they idle or well filled with work, give young men the custom of play, and surround them with an atmosphere of culture which leaves them with bountiful resources for hours of leisure, while they insure to them in these years of growth wholesome, unworried freedom from such business pressure as the successful parent is so apt to put on too youthful shoulders.
Somewhat distracted by the desire to be brief, and yet to tell the whole story, I have sought, in what I fear is a very loose and disconnected way, to put in a new light some of the evils which are hurting the mothers of our race, and those which every day's experience teaches the doctor are gravely affecting the working capacity of numberless men. I trust I have succeeded in satisfying my readers that we dwell in a climate where work of all kinds demands greater precautions as to health than is the case abroad. We cannot improve our climate, but it is quite possible that we have not sufficiently learned to modify the conditions of labor in accordance with those of the sky under which we live.
No student of the nervous maladies of American men and women will think I have overdrawn any part of the foregoing sketch. It would have been as easy, had such a course been proper, to tell the individual stories of youth, vigorous, eager, making haste to be rich, wrecked and made unproductive and dependent for years or forever; and of middle age, unable or unwilling to pause in the career of dollar-getting, crushed to earth in the hour of fruition, or made powerless to labor longer at any cost for those who were dearest.
[2]In 1871.
[3]See, now, "Brain-Work and Overwork," by H.C. Wood, M.D.; also, "Mental Overwork and Premature Disease among Public and Professional Men," by Ch. K. Mills, M.D.; also, "Overwork and Sanitation in Public Schools, with Remarks on the Production of Nervous Disease and Insanity," by Ch. K. Mills, M.D.,--Annals of Hygiene, September, 1886.
[4]I asked two citizens of this uneasy town--on the same day--what was their business. Both replied tranquilly that they were speculators!
[5]Forty-ninth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, p. 204 (John T. Prince).
[6]Witness Richardson's heroine, who was "perfect mistress of the four rules of arithmetic"!
[7]In the city where this is written there is, so far as I know, not one private girls' school in a building planned for a school-house. As a consequence, we hear endless complaints from young ladies of overheated or chilly rooms. If the teacher be old, the room is kept too warm; if she be young, and much afoot about her school, the apartment is apt to be cold.
[8]Miss Pendleton.
[9]Philadelphia.
[10]The new emigrant suffers in a high degree from the same evils as to cookery which affect only less severely the mass of our people, and this, no doubt, helps to enfeeble him. The frying-pan has, I fear, a better right to be called our national emblem than the eagle, and I grieve to say it reigns supreme west of the Alleghanies. I well remember that a party of friends about to camp out were unable to buy a gridiron in two Western towns, each numbering over four thousand eaters of fried meats.
[2]In 1871.
[3]See, now, "Brain-Work and Overwork," by H.C. Wood, M.D.; also, "Mental Overwork and Premature Disease among Public and Professional Men," by Ch. K. Mills, M.D.; also, "Overwork and Sanitation in Public Schools, with Remarks on the Production of Nervous Disease and Insanity," by Ch. K. Mills, M.D.,--Annals of Hygiene, September, 1886.
[4]I asked two citizens of this uneasy town--on the same day--what was their business. Both replied tranquilly that they were speculators!
[5]Forty-ninth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, p. 204 (John T. Prince).
[6]Witness Richardson's heroine, who was "perfect mistress of the four rules of arithmetic"!
[7]In the city where this is written there is, so far as I know, not one private girls' school in a building planned for a school-house. As a consequence, we hear endless complaints from young ladies of overheated or chilly rooms. If the teacher be old, the room is kept too warm; if she be young, and much afoot about her school, the apartment is apt to be cold.
[8]Miss Pendleton.
[9]Philadelphia.
[10]The new emigrant suffers in a high degree from the same evils as to cookery which affect only less severely the mass of our people, and this, no doubt, helps to enfeeble him. The frying-pan has, I fear, a better right to be called our national emblem than the eagle, and I grieve to say it reigns supreme west of the Alleghanies. I well remember that a party of friends about to camp out were unable to buy a gridiron in two Western towns, each numbering over four thousand eaters of fried meats.