of our countrymen is what alone serves to keep up our pristine force and energy.  Are we not merely using the interest on these accumulations of power, but also wastefully spending the capital?  From a few we have grown to millions, and already in many ways the people of the Atlantic coast present the peculiarities of an old nation.  Have we lived too fast?  The settlers here, as elsewhere, had ample room, and lived sturdily by their own hands, little troubled for the most part with those intense competitions which make it hard to live nowadays and embitter the daily bread of life.  Neither had they the thousand intricate problems to solve which perplex those who struggle to-day in our teeming city hives.  Above all, educational wants were limited in kind and in degree, and the physical man and woman were what the growing state most needed.

How much and what kind of good came of the gradual change in all these matters we well enough know.  That in one and another way the cruel competition for the dollar, the new and exacting habits of business, the racing speed which the telegraph and railway have introduced into commercial life, the new value which great fortunes have come to possess as means towards social advancement, and the overeducation and overstraining of our young people, have brought about some great and growing evils, is what is now beginning to be distinctly felt.  I should like, therefore, at the risk of being tedious, to re-examine this question—­to see if it be true that the nervous system of certain classes of Americans is being sorely overtaxed—­and to ascertain how much our habits, our modes of work, and, haply, climatic peculiarities, may have to do with this state of things.  But before venturing anew upon a subject which may possibly excite controversy and indignant comment, let me premise that I am talking chiefly of the crowded portions of our country, of our great towns, and especially of their upper classes, and am dealing with those higher questions of mental hygiene of which in general we hear but too little.  If the strictures I have to make applied as fully throughout the land—­to Oregon as to New England, to the farmer as to the business man, to the women of the artisan class as to those socially above them—­then indeed I should cry, God help us and those that are to come after us!  Owing to causes which are obvious enough, the physical worker is being better and better paid and less and less hardly tasked, while just the reverse obtains in increasing ratios for those who live by the lower form of brain-work; so that the bribe to use the hand is growing daily, and pure mechanical labor, as opposed to that of the clerk, is being “levelled upward” with fortunate celerity.

Before attempting to indicate certain ways in which we as a people are overtaxing and misusing the organs of thought, I should be glad to have the privilege of explaining the terms which it is necessary to use, and of pointing out some of the conditions under which mental labor is performed.