1875.) Longevity of Brain-Workers. 445 
must be granted without argument, that of two men every 
way alike and similarly circumstanced, the one who has the 
greater courage and grit will be the longer-lived. One does 
not need to practtise medicine long to learn that men die 
that might just as well live if they resolved to live; and 
that myriads who are invalids could become strong if they 
had the native or acquired will to vow that they would do 
so. Those who have no other quality favourable to life, 
whose bodily organs are nearly all diseased, to whom each 
day is a day of pain, who are beset by life-shortening influ- 
ences, yet do live by grit alone. Races and the sexes illus- 
trate this. The pluck of the Anglo-Saxon is shown as 
much on the sick-bed as in Wall Street or on the battle- 
field. During the late war, I had chances enough to see 
how thoroughly the black man wilted under light sickness, 
and was slain by disease, over which his white brother 
would have easily triumphed. When the negro feels the 
hand of disease pressing upon him, however gently, all his 
spirit leaves him. ‘The great men of history are as much 
superior in their will-power to the average of their fellows, 
as are the races to which they belong to the inferior and 
uncivilised races. They live, for the same reason that they 
become famous. They obtain fame because they will not 
be obscure; they live because they will not die. 
4. Great men work more easily than ordinary men. Their 
expenditure of force to accomplish great things is less plen- 
teous than the expenditure of ordinary men to accomplish 
such things. A Liverpoel draft-horse draws with ease a load 
at which a delicate racer might tug and strain without moving 
it. Ruskin is quite right when he says that the greatest 
work is done easily. The best action is the unconscious. 
It is the essence of genius to be automatic and spontaneous. 
The common mind cannot attain this spontaneity, or at any 
rate only to a slight degree. Many a huckster or corner 
tradesman expends each day more force on work or worry 
than a Stewart or a Vanderbilt. It is notorious that Beecher’s 
great sermons cost him only an hour’s musing or so, while 
many country pastors work for a week over “efforts” that 
suggest no thought, except pity for the composer. Great 
genius is usually industrious, for it is its nature to be active; 
but its movements are easy, spontaneous, joyous. There 
are probably many school-boys who have exhausted them- 
selves more over a prize composition than Shakespeare over 
“Hamlet,” or Milton over the choicest passages in “‘ Para- 
dise Lost.” At one time I acted as surgeon on a gunboat of 
the United States Navy on the blockade, which was under 
