Strange as it may seem, much of all this may happen to a man, and he may still struggle onward, ignorant of the terrible demands he is making upon an exhausted brain.  Usually, by this time he has sought advice, and, if his doctor be worthy of the title, has learned that while there are certain aids for his symptoms in the shape of drugs, there is only one real remedy.  Happy he if not too late in discovering that complete and prolonged cessation from work is the one thing needful.  Not a week of holiday, or a month, but probably a year or more of utter idleness may be absolutely essential.  Only this will answer in cases so extreme as that which I have tried to depict, and even this will not always insure a return to a state of active working health.

I am very far from conceding that the vehement energy with which we do our work is due altogether to greed.  We probably idle less and play less than any other race, and the absence of national habits of sport, especially in the West, leaves the man of business with no inducement to abandon that unceasing labor in which at last he finds his sole pleasure.  He does not ride, or shoot, or fish, or play any game but euchre.  Business absorbs him utterly, and at last he finds neither time nor desire for books.  The newspaper is his sole literature; he has never had time to acquire a taste for any reading save his ledger.  Honest friendship for books comes with youth or, as a rule, not at all.  At last his hour of peril arrives.  Then you may separate him from business, but you will find that to divorce his thoughts from it is impossible.  The fiend of work he raised no man can lay.  As to foreign travel, it wearies him.  He has not the culture which makes it available or pleasant.  Notwithstanding the plasticity of the American, he is now without resources.  What then to advise I have asked myself countless times.  Let him at least look to it that his boys go not the same evil road.  The best business men are apt to think that their own successful careers represent the lives their children ought to follow, and that the four years of college spoil a lad for business.  In reality these years, be they idle or well filled with work, give young men the custom of play, and surround them with an atmosphere of culture which leaves them with bountiful resources for hours of leisure, while they insure to them in these years of growth wholesome, unworried freedom from such business pressure as the successful parent is so apt to put on too youthful shoulders.

Somewhat distracted by the desire to be brief, and yet to tell the whole story, I have sought, in what I fear is a very loose and disconnected way, to put in a new light some of the evils which are hurting the mothers of our race, and those which every day’s experience teaches the doctor are gravely affecting the working capacity of numberless men.  I trust I have succeeded in satisfying my readers that we dwell in a climate where work of all kinds demands greater precautions as to health than is the case abroad.  We cannot improve our climate, but it is quite possible that we have not sufficiently learned to modify the conditions of labor in accordance with those of the sky under which we live.