Elsewhere I have referred to the Indians’ attitude of mind.  If a matter can be changed, change it; if not grin and bear it without complaint.  Here is practical wisdom.  But to worry over a thing that can be changed, instead of changing it, is the height of folly, and if a matter cannot be changed why worry over it?  How utterly useless is the worry.  Then, too, worry is the parent of nagging.  Nagging is worry put into words,—­the verbal expression of worry about or towards individuals.  The mother wishes her son would do differently.  Can the boy’s actions be changed?  Then go to work to change them—­not to worry over them.  If they cannot be changed, why nag him, why irritate him, why make a bad matter worse?  Nagging, like worry, never once did one iota of good; it has caused infinite harm, as it sets up an irritation between those whose love might overcome the difficulty if it were let alone.  Nagging is the constant irritation of a wound, the rubbing of a sore, the salting an abraded place, the giving a hungry man a tract, religious advice or a bible, when all he craves is food.

Ah, mother! many a boy has run away from home because your worry led you to nag him; many a girl to-day is on the streets because father or mother nagged her; many a husband has “gone on a tear” because he could not face his wife’s “worry put into words,” even though no one would attempt to deny that boy, girl and husband alike were wrong in every particular, and the “nagger” in the right, save in the one thing of worry and its consequent nagging.

In watching the lives of men and women I have been astonished, again and again, that the fruitlessness of their worry did not demonstrate its uselessness to them.  No good ever comes from it.  Everybody who has any perception sees this, agrees to it, confesses it.  Then why still persist in it?  Yet they do, and at the same time expect to be regarded as intelligent, sane, normal human beings, many of whom claim, as members of churches, peculiar and close kinship with God, forgetful of the fact that every moment spent in worry is dishonoring to God.

How much needless anxiety, care, and absolute torture some women suffer in an insane desire to keep their homes spotlessly clean.  The house must be without a speck of dirt anywhere; the kitchen must be as spotless as the parlor; the sink must be so immaculate that you could eat from it, if necessary; the children must always be in their best bibs and tuckers and appear as Little Lord Fauntleroys; and no one, at any time, or any circumstance, must ever appear to be dirty, except the scavenger who comes to remove the accumulated debris of the kitchen, and the man who occasionally assists the gardener.