Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 November 1908 — Stevenson on Idleness. [ARTICLE]

Stevenson on Idleness.

If a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept but thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused, and within practical limits it Is one of the most incontestible truths in the whole body of morality. Look at one of your Industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. lie sows burry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to Interest and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he absents himself from all fellowship and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden ink pot. or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work. Ido not care how much or how well he works, this fellow Is an evil feature in other people’s lives. They would be happier If he were dead.—Robert Louis Stevenson.