Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 August 1875 — A Needed Lesson of the Day. [ARTICLE]

A Needed Lesson of the Day.

More rest for the overtasked mind, more rest for the weary body—this is the needed lesson of to-day, and by none needed so much a? by Americans. And, we ask, when will they take it, not fitfully, but systematically, for themselves and rive it to their employes? Not, we fear, tin they learn that the incessant pursuit of wealth, for its own sake, is one of the poorest sjeculations man ever entered into; not till they learn that the best work is done by a sound mind and a sound body, in which the laws of physical hygiene are strictly fulfilled; not till they find, as so many do, to their cost, that relaxation* and proper rest give a zest to life that no mere acquirement of wealth can furnish. There are several sides to this question; let us look at a few of them. Take that wonderful, mysterious connection between our spiritual and our physical natures. A wound in Wordsworth’s foot was made sensitive to irritation in proportion as he worked or ceased from labor, and, though a hard worker, by tramping over the Cheviot hills and breathing the fresh air he reached four score. Shelley found that working hard at the Cenci brought on a severe pain, which ceased with a cessation of work. Hamerten records the case of a tradesman whose constant attention to business produced alarming cerebral symptoms, which disappeared when he had recourse to recreation. And it is, furthermore, the testimony of the superintendent of one of our best insane asylums that a very large proportion of the inmates owe their sad condition to over-work. These halting gaits—the painful steps and slow of the paralytics, the anxiety and deep furrows of care visible upon so many faces —tell not so much of hard work as of want of rest. In fact, so universal and complete is the testimony showing physical exercise—when the constitution is strong enough to bear it, and simple relaxation when it is not—to be essential to all conditions of successful labor, that the mighty fact of fcthe absolute need of recreation is incontrovertibly established, an attempt to ignore which is a crime against nature that sooner or later brings its own deserved punishment. Heaven is filled with saints who have gone there with a large part of their earth work unfulfilled; and if earth be but a preparation for heaven it is a pity that overwork sent them into the other world not half so well prepared as they might have been.

In business and in professional pursuits—in which the mind is equally taxed, but in a different way—Englishmen, Germans and the French find time for rest; only Americans set out to do the work of a century in a generation, and worry and hurry and push and fret, only to fall into premature graves. Lord Jeffrey, at the age of sixty, said that were it not for the relaxation he obtained from his love of nature and poetry his heart would have died within him years before. Dr. Chalmers, whose favorite speculation it was, which he afterward put into practice, that the seventh decade of human life should be turned into the Sabbath of an early pilgrimage, and spent sabbatically, as if on the shore of an eternal world, he and such workersas Goethe, and Kant, and Ruskin and Guizot, and in our own country Jefferson, and Webster, and Sumner, and Greeley, and Walworth and Edward, all found time for rest; and their work was better and their lives sweeter for it. * It is this over-work —met with on every hand, showing the determination of Americans to realize the sentiment so finely expressed by Milton— To scorn delights, and live laborious days, which is making mental, moral, and physical wrecks of young men, ana bringing those in middle-life on the threshold ot ola age. It is this which fully justifies the observation of an English writer,, who, in reply to a remark made to him that the Americans have no physiognomy, says: “To me their physiognomy seems most strongly marked. * The features, even of the young, are fiirrowed with lines of anxious thought. Every American looks as if his eyes were glaring into the far West and the far future. Th,e American never plays. He is indifferent to the play either of mind or muscle. The Americans are the most serious people m the world.” \ And he concludes: “ The same terrible earnestness is, I am persuaded, at the bottom of that ill-health which is so serious a curse to American life. No doubt other things contribute — climate, stimulants, sedentary occupations, and so forth; but the deepest-rooted cause of American disease is that over-working 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, ana all its brood of fell disorders in its train. In a word, the American works himself to death.” That is just it. Six words tell the whole story: “ The American works himself to death.” Parents, employers, shall we ever get beyond this? Merchants, bankers, lawyers, machinists, artisans, men of all trades, business and professions, will you not heed the lesson which comes from over-strained humanity; will you not listen to the voice which comes up from thousands of premature grave and give yourselves, your children and your employes needed rest? A prominent Wall street broker assured the writer not long since that, if they would only do it, the entire Wall street fraternity could do their business in five days of the week, taking Saturday for vacation. And yet even now we hear of those who are cutting down their employes’ vacation to ten days; others give only a week, and we know of some who do not give even a day in the whole year. All this is a crime against nature. Americans, as individuals, scarcely have a youth. A young man dies, if not a hundred years old, at least prematurely aged, with wasted form, a haggard face, and a puny voice. Consumption claims more victims from over-work than from anything else. And the corroding influence of this weary, wasting, neverceasing habit of work, consumes not only the elasticity of the frame, but in too many instances the better feelings of the heart. We appeal to every Christian man to whom these lines shall come to make needful rest for himself and those dependent upon him a matter of individual con-

science and concern. So doing, your own life will be fresher and sweeter, you will make others happy, and you shall find that, with the heavens bending over yon and a bit of heaven within you, you may realize even here the blessedness of the heavenly promise of a rest from labor.— Christian at Work.