Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1875 — The Mental Effect of Pecuniary Pressure. [ARTICLE]

The Mental Effect of Pecuniary Pressure.

Tension is, we believe, the secret of the insanity so often produced by pecuniary trouble, but the inquiry must still be pushed one step further back. Why is the tension so extreme? Why do men, and especially men just outside the limit of poverty, fear poverty so much more, especially for others, than they fear still graver evils? Why, for instance, will a father, half-maddened by the idea that his daughter will be reduced to manual labor, remain comparatively tranquil when informed that all the symptoms which indicate cancer axe present in the object of his affections? The popular answer that poverty, in our artificial state of society, involves all miseries, hunger, overwork, humiliation, is scarcely sufficient, for human beings able to judge would choose them all in preference to cancer. We believe the causes for this overweening horror of poverty, which certainly exists, and with many classes in this country furnishes an overpowering motive in life, are two, both of them easy to be explained. The first cause undoubtedly is that men fear most those future troubles which they most clearly realize, and that they realize very few. The majority of mankind, fortunately for themselves, have very little imagination, and that imagination is most easfly stirred upon its hopeful side. Every man must die, and how very few think often of that greatest of events! It, is the hardest thing in the world to Induce men even to expect pain, and the man who knows perfectly well that a burst of temper will bring on angina pectoris, or that a glass of sherry will renew the -torture of gout, still indulges his anger or his taste without any serious fear. The best argument against transportation as a punishment is that criminals hare such a difficulty in realizing its meaning—soldiers, for instance, in India, often try to be transported—and it is the same want of imagination which, even in countries where the population have a horror of suffering, makes universal conscription possible. People do, however, realize poverty, realize it thoroughly and painfully, and dread it, therefore, as they never dread very much worse evils. They know what it is to have no money, and the prospect of having none affects them as keenly as if they were already destitute. The second cause we believe to be the sense of injustice which enters into this peculiar form of suffering. Men submit to evils visibly dealt out to them by heaven or fate with a resignation they are often unable to display under evils in which human will is an operating cause. We take it, the man who commits suicide from pecuniary pressure will always be found to be a man who has worked, and who has raged secretly or openly at the apparent injustice involved in work bringing no return. Nothing overt irns the balance of the mind so quickly as a long-continued sense of injustice, and nothing, especially in the army and merchant navy, is so frequent a cause for suicide.— London Spectator. The Philadelphians have now found the identical compass and chain which were used ta laying out their precise, chess-board-like city. The benevolent William Penn himself manipulated the articles, which have been placed on exhibition. —Only 17 per cent, of the inhabitants of New YorX city are native-born of native-born parents, while nearly 83 per cent, are foreigners and the children of foreigners.