1879*! 
A merican Nervousness. 
603 
poem, a constant holiday, a perpetual picnic. Of study, 
toil, or work, to which the New York boy is early trained, 
he knew nothing. Work is really a modem institution. All 
culture, history, science, literature, and languages that have 
appeared in the world during the past two thousand years, 
the lad of to-day must try to acquaint himself with. Of all 
these the Athenians knew nothing — could not even predict. 
When we contrast the life of an American child, from its 
early school days until the hour it leaves the university 
or seminary, the many and tiresome hours of study, the 
endless committing and repeating and forgetting, the con- 
finement in constrained positions, the over-heated and over- 
dried atmosphere, the newspapers and novels that he is and 
must be prepared to converse about and criticise, the sermons 
and lectures which he is compelled to listen to and analyse, 
the strife and struggle for bread and competence against 
inordinate competition, the worry and concentration of work 
made both possible and necessary by the railway, mail- 
service, and the telegraph ; in view of these fafts we wonder 
not that the Americans are so nervous, but rather wonder at 
the power of adaptation of the human frame for unfavourable 
environment. The education of the Athenian boy consisted 
in play, and games, and songs, and repetitions of poems, 
and physical feats in the open air. His life was a long 
vacation, in which, as a rule, he rarely toiled as hard as the 
American lad in the intervals of his studies. 
The rapidity of our modern and American life has a 
tendency to concentrate an enormous amount of activity in 
a brief space of time. The intensity, the fierceness, and 
violence of our toil are the results of our climate, and in 
their turn they deepen and intensify our nervous sensibility. 
In the study of this subject the disposition has been to look 
exclusively at some one of these secondary elements — our 
haste in motion or our haste in eating, and to consider some 
one such fadtor as the sole cause of American nervousness. 
Indeed I may say that up to the present time this has been 
the popular mode of interpreting the unparalleled pheno- 
mena connedled with American nervousness. Effects have, 
indeed, been confounded with causes — a process of reasoning 
which, it may be added, vitiates and destroys nearly all 
human philosophy, and nearly on all themes, but especially 
on questions of sociology, such as the effects of stimulants 
and narcotics, or diet, or social customs. American ner- 
vousness is a complex resultant of a number of factors — 
not a single result of one. In order to understand it, to 
grasp it, to master its philosophy, we must be able to see 
