108 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



minds only too ready to take refuge in any excuse for inactivity. If 

 the private asylums of the country were searched for the victims of 

 " overwork," they would nearly all he found to have fallen a prey to 

 " worry," or to that degeneracy which results from lack of purpose in 

 life and steady employment. This is' a grave assertion, but it points 

 to an evil it is especially needful to expose. Weak minds drift into 

 dementia with wondrous celerity when they are not carried forward 

 to some goal, it matters little what, by the impulse of a strong motive. 

 The bugbear of " overwork " is, it may be feared, deterring parents 

 and friends from enforcing the need of sedulous industry on the 

 young. The pernicious system of " cram " slays its thousands, be- 

 cause uneducated, undeveloped, inelastic intellects are burdened and 

 strained with information adroitly deposited in the memory, as an 

 expert valet packs a portmanteau, with the articles likely to be first 

 wanted on the top. Desultory occupation, mere play with objects of 

 which the true interest is not appreciated, ruins a still larger number ; 

 while worry, that bane of brain-work and mental energy, counts its 

 victims by tens of thousands, a holocaust of minds sacrificed to the 

 demon of discord, the foe of happiness, of morality, of success. The 

 enemy takes many shapes and assumes bewildering disguises. Some- 

 times he comes in like a flood, hurrying everything before him ; with 

 heaps of work to be done in less than adequate time. Now the victim 

 is hurried from task to task with a celerity fatal to sanity. Then he 

 is chained like a galley-slave to some uncongenial labor without res- 

 pite. Again, a buzz of distracting and irritating mental annoyances 

 seem let loose to distress and distract him. Under each and all of 

 these guises it is worry that molests, and, unless he be rescued, will 

 ruin him. Meanwhile, the miseries of "overwork," pure and simple, 

 are few and comparatively insignificant. Those who bewail their in- 

 fliction most loudly are weak of mind or torpid of brain. Of such 

 lame and maimed mortals we are not now thinking. Their lot may 

 be humiliating or pitiable, as their condition is due to neglect or mis- 

 fortune ; but our concern is with the multitude of strong and able- 

 minded workers who fail at their task. These are the victims not of 

 overwork but of worry, a foe more treacherous and merciless than all 

 besides. The mind-cure for the malady to which "worry" gives rise, 

 and from which so many suffer, is not idleness, or " rest," in the ordi- 

 nary sense of that term, but orderly and persistent work. The work 

 by which they have been injured has not been excessive, but bad of 

 its kind and badly done. The palsied faculties must be strengthened 

 and incited to healthy nutrition by new activity, at first, perhaps, 

 administered in the form of passive mental movement, and then in- 

 duced by appropriate stimuli applied to the mind. Nineteenth Cen- 

 tury. 



