CHAPTER XX.

OVERWORK AND UNDER-REST.

Steads not, to work on the clean jump,

Nor wine nor brains perpetual pump. - R. W. EMERSON.

The deepest-rooted cause of American disease is that overworking of the brain and over-excitement of the nervous system, which are the necessary consequences of their intense activity. Hence nervous dyspepsia, with consumption, insanity, and all its brood of fell disorders in its train. In a word, the American works himself to death. JAMES STIRLING.

The body has its claims,

....

it is a good servant; treat it well, and it will do your work; attend to its wants and requirements, listen kindly and patiently to its hints, occasionally forestall its necessities by a little indul. gence, and your consideration will be repaid with interest. But task it and pine it and suffocate it, make it a slave instead of a servant, it may not complain much, but, like the weary camel in the desert, it will lie down and die. - CHARLES ELAM, A Physician's Problems.

A

N able London journal * has an article on the subject of Drudgery, in which it protests against the modern and absurd notion that work is an intrinsic good, or what moralists call an end. The modern revival of the dogma of the nobleness of work it thinks was well, but it has been pushed too far. The worship of work for its own sake it pronounces mere fetichism, and almost as pernicious an extreme as the antiquated and now comparatively unfashionable worship of idleness.

We deeply sympathize with this protest, which was never more urgently needed than at this hour. Everywhere men are killing themselves by overwork, by intense, exhausting labor of hand and brain; and the remonstrance has come not a moment too soon. The life of the present day is lived at feverheat. There is a fierce struggle going on in all the departments of labor, and the mental wear and tear is enormous. Life, in all of the professions, is literally a battle, and men are falling

* The Saturday Review.

by hundreds in the thick of the fight. The desire to get rich in a few years, the pride of doing an immense business," or of being the leader of the bar or the medical profession, leads thousands "to work double tides"; and they go stumbling on, robbing themselves of sleep and rest and play, till they break down into an insane asylum or into the grave.

Welcome, then, to the later gospel, which proclaims that work is not an end in itself, much less the highest earthly good. Far nearer the truth is the doctrine of Moses and of the most ancient cosmogonists, that work is a primeval curse, the result of sin. The curse may, indeed, like all human afflictions, be turned into a blessing; but a curse, nevertheless, it is in itself, and only to be borne because the alternative of idleness is infinitely worse. Work, when worshipped as it sometimes is by its servants, or when compelled by avarice, impatience, or early follies, too often degenerates into drudgery, and its most enthusiastic eulogists will not pretend that it is then a blessing. There is nothing in drudgery that is fitted to produce happiness or beauty of character. On the contrary, its tendency is to mar all that is fair and lovely in the most cultivated natures.

Of all the nations of the earth there is no one among whom this doctrine of "grind" has taken deeper root than among us Americans. From the days of the Puritans we have been excessively fond of work, — work, not as a means of getting a living only, but in itself and for its own sake. It seems as if we felt the primeval curse ever weighing upon us, and so we continue to drudge like galley-slaves, even after we have provided for the ever-dreaded "rainy day," and the pressure of bread-getting has long since passed. Hence we have so few holidays and seasons of rest or recreation, that, when they do come, we are quite perplexed to know what to do with ourselves. It is for the same reason that these days are grossly abused by many in riotous dissipation, drunkenness, and otherwise swamping themselves with abominations; for, as an old writer says, those that seldom take lawful pleasure will take unlawful," and by lacing themselves too hard, grow awry

on one side." Others, again, alternate a long spell of excessive labor with a comparatively short spell of excessive repose, eleven months in the treadmill with one at Saratoga, - which is about as rational as to maintain that a man who has taken a bottle of brandy one day and a quart of water the next has been drinking brandy and water.

When shall we learn that, as Aristotle long ago said, the end of labor is to gain leisure: and that hence it is possible to be just as immoderately and evilly addicted to work as to indulgence, and that an equal amount, though a different kind of mischief, may accrue to one's self and family in one direction as in the other? When will the old theological idea that mortals are sent here as to a place of sore chastisement and mortification be scouted from our minds? It is time that this everlasting drudgery should cease among us, and that some higher lesson should be impressed upon the brain of the infantile Yankee than the old saws about industry, money-getting, and the like. Let us abate something, at least, of our devotion to the almighty dollar, and regard the world as something better than a huge workshop, in which we are to toil and moil unceasingly, till death stops the human machine. Let us learn that the surest and best way to get on in the world is not to travel by "lightning lines," but "to hasten slowly." It is a libel on Providence to suppose that it has designed that we should live such a plodding, mechanical life, that we should be mere mill-horses, treading evermore the same dull, unvarying round, and all for grist, grist, still grist, till we have become as blind and stupid as that most unhappy of all quadrupeds. Still more absurd is it to suppose that to work desperately, to be intensely employed, is in itself praiseworthy, even though it be about something which has no truth, beauty, or usefulness in it, and which makes no man happier or wiser. The truth is, that, as one of the wisest of modern essayists has remarked, to work insatiably requires much less mind than to work judiciously, and less courage than to refuse work that cannot be done honestly. "For a hundred men," says Arthur Helps,

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"whose appetite for work can be driven on by vanity, avarice, ambition, or a mistaken notion of advancing their families. there is about one who is desirous of expanding his own nature and the nature of others in all directions, of cultivating many pursuits, of bringing himself and those around him in contact with the universe in many points, of being a man,

and not a machine."

"I shall die first a-top," was the mournful exclamation of Dean Swift, as he gazed on a noble oak whose upper branches had been struck by lightning; "I shall be like that tree, I shall die first a-top." Afflicted for years with giddiness and pain in the head, he looked forward with prophetic dread to insanity as the probable termination of his existence; and after nine years of mental and bodily suffering, the great satirist, the mighty polemic, the wit and the poet, died as he had feared and half predicted, "in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole."

"Dying at the top " is the disease to which a fearful number of Americans are to-day exposed. In the high-wrought state of civilization to which we have attained, hardly any complaint is more common than that of a brain overworked. The complaint is not uttered by literary men and scholars only, but is echoed by all who are striving for fame or fortune against eager and formidable competitors. The lawyer, the clergyman, the merchant, the speculator, all are suffering from overwork; from that strain of special faculties in the direction towards special objects, out of which comes nervous exhaustion, with the maladies consequent on overstimulus and prolonged fatigue. In every sphere of labor, the highest as well as the lowest, we behold on all sides men whose time and strength are completely absorbed by the effort to get a living for themselves and their families; "mechanics whose life is one steady, unceasing grind in the treadmill of daily routine; merchants who have become mere attachés of their counter, and clerks who are living appendages of their pens; clergymen whose brains have been converted into a gland to secrete and discharge two sermons a

week; editors who have turned their wits into paragraphs until they are little else than walking items and talking squibs; women who have sewed themselves into their garments until their life is but a thread."

It is in our great cities that this evil has reached the most fearful pass. A person living a quiet, leisurely life in the country can have no adequate conception of the severe and exhausting labors to which hundreds subject themselves in a second-rate city in his neighborhood, especially in the higher walks of professional life; nor can the inhabitant of such a city, groan as he may under his toils, conceive of the more burdensome duties of the corresponding classes in a great commercial centre. The brain of a leading lawyer, merchant, or business man is forever on the stretch. By day and by night he can think of nothing and dream of nothing but the iron realities of life. Anxious, perplexing thought sits on his brow as he rubs his eyes at daybreak; hurrying to the breakfasttable, he swallows his steak and his coffee in a twinkling, jumps up from his chair almost immediately, and, without having spoken a pleasant word, hastens away to the high courts of Mammon, to engage in the sharp struggle for pelf. There he spends hour after hour in calculating how to change his hundreds to thousands; dinner and supper-which he bolts, never eats come and go almost without observation; even nightfall finds him still employed, with body and mind jaded, and eyes smarting with sleeplessness; till at length, far in the night, the toil-worn laborer seeks his couch, only to think of the struggles and anxieties of the day, or to dream of those of to-morrow. Thus things go on day after day, till the poor bond-slave of Mammon finds his constitution shattered; the doctor is summoned, and sends him to Europe; he travels listlessly, he cannot leave thought behind him; the disease creeps on apace; the undertaker soon takes his dimensions in his mind's eye; paralysis seizes him; he lives a few years organically alive to enjoy the fruits of his labors, and then descends to his everlasting rest, with the glorious satisfaction,