Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1895 — SLOW TO ANGER. [ARTICLE]

SLOW TO ANGER.

Average American Citizen Submits to Much Imposition. W. W. Watson, of Chicago, waited six months before he complained about a peanut-vender’s whistle on one of the postoffiee corners, though he suffered acutely in mind and body from the piercing shriek it emitted all day long. He lost flesh worrying about it, it stirred every fiber in his being, his ears rang with its sound after he had gone home at night, he dreamed of it, It destroyed his appetite and his temper, and unfitted him for business. But it was not until six months of this torture had passed that he thought of complaining. When he did complain the noise was stopped. There you have the American citizen, all over. He will endure any annoyances rather than make a row about it Fruit peddlers disturb his rest In the early morning and awake him to a day of nervousness and ill-temper. He is interrupted in his progress down-town by an open bridge. His nostrils are filled and his skin blackened with the nasty smoke of noisy tugs. He stumbles along a narrow path in a sidewalk almost wholly covered with fruit baskets that have no right to be there. He-picks his way through mud and filth at the crossings. People dig their elbows into his ribs and step on his toes in the elevator. He lunches in a room crowded to suffocation and nausea; he is served by insolent, careless, unclean waiters, with food dumped upon a thick and greasy plate; he orders coffee and gets a vile liquid that tastes like dishwater. He is importuned by newsboys who cease from yelling only while they make change. He walks in the perilous street around the mortar-beds and heaps of brick and lumber that occupy the sidewalk in front of buildings being torn down or put up, and he is spattered with mud from head to foot. He climbs upon a street ear and hanging on to a strap or clinging to a rail Is crushed by all sorts of people. He is detained in a tunnel by a broken cable and cheerfully walks the rest of the way. In the evening he listens to the strident cries of gamins and hoodlums and to the nerve-wrecking noises of the strolling brass band and the portable hand organ, goes to bed to spend the whole night inhaling the sickening odor of Bridgeport and part of it hearing the wail of the switch engine and the bumping crash of the freight car—and never complains. It ljever occurs to him to complain. He will stand anything rather than complain, even though he knows complaint will end his suffering. The American citizen is the good-na-tured man of the fables. He knows he has rights, but is too easy-going and complaisant to stand up for them. He has a horror of a “scene.” He is afraid of disagreeable prominence. He prefers to slink alone harried, insulted, browbeaten, with shattered nerves. It is easier. But how much longer the city dweller would live, how much pleasanter his life would be, how much healthier he would find himself, if only he had a little more courage and a little more obstinacy. One-half the noises that make him miserable are totfilly Unnecessary and could be stopped if he took a firm stand, and the other half would not be necessary if he set bis ingenuity to work. But be will do neither. Is it any wonder neurasthenia grows common? Is it any wonder the race is degenerating?