The worst instances to be met with are among young men suddenly cast into business positions involving weighty responsibility.  I can recall several cases of men under or just over twenty-one who have lost health while attempting to carry the responsibilities of great manufactories.  Excited and stimulated by the pride of such a charge, they have worked with a certain exaltation of brain, and, achieving success, have been stricken down in the moment of triumph.  This too frequent practice of immature men going into business, especially with borrowed capital, is a serious evil.  The same person, gradually trained to naturally and slowly increasing burdens, would have been sure of healthy success.  In individual cases I have found it so often vain to remonstrate or to point out the various habits which collectively act for mischief on our business class that I may well despair of doing good by a mere general statement.  As I have noted them, connected with cases of overwork, they are these:  late hours of work, irregular meals bolted in haste away from home, the want of holidays and of pursuits outside of business, and the consequent practice of carrying home, as the only subject of talk, the cares and successes of the counting-house and the stock-board.  Most of these evil habits require no comment.  What, indeed, can be said?  The man who has worked hard all day, and lunched or dined hastily, comes home or goes to the club to converse—­save the mark!—­about goods and stocks.  Holidays, except in summer, he knows not, and it is then thought time enough taken from work if the man sleeps in the country and comes into a hot city daily, or at the best has a week or two at the sea-shore.  This incessant monotony tells in the end.  Men have confessed to me that for twenty years they had worked every day, often travelling at night or on Sundays to save time, and that in all this period they had not taken one day for play.  These are extreme instances, but they are also in a measure representative of a frightfully general social evil.

Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men?  There comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and just as they are thinking, “Now we will stop and enjoy ourselves,” the brain, which, slave-like, never murmurs until it breaks out into open insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done.  There are therefore two periods of existence especially prone to those troubles,—­one when the mind is maturing; another at the turning-point of life, when the brain has attained its fullest power, and has left behind it accomplished the larger part of its best enterprise and most active labor.