THE HOT AXLE.
The express train was flying from Cork to Queenstown. It was going like
sixty--that is, about sixty miles an hour. No sight of an Irish village to
arrest our speed, no sign of break-down, and yet the train halted. We
looked out of the window, saw the brakemen and a crowd of passengers
gathering around the locomotive and a dense smoke arising. What was the
matter? A hot axle!
We were on the lightning train for Cleveland. We had no time to spare. If
we stopped for a half hour we should be greeted by the anathema of a
lecturing committee. We felt a sort of presentiment that we should be too
late, when to confirm it the whistle blew, and the brakes fell, and the cry
all along the train was, "What is the matter?" Answer: "A hot axle!" The
wheels had been making too many revolutions in a minute. The car was on
fire. It was a very difficult thing to put it out; water, sand and swabs
were tried, and caused long detention and a smoke that threatened flame
down to the end of the journey.
We thought then, and think now, this is what is the matter with people
everywhere. In this swift, "express," American life, we go too fast for our
endurance. We think ourselves getting on splendidly, when in the midst of
our successes we come to a dead halt. What is the matter? Nerves or muscles
or brains give out. We have made too many revolutions in an hour. A hot
axle!
Men make the mistake of working according to their opportunities, and not
according to their capacity of endurance. "Can I run this train from
Springfield to Boston at the rate of fifty miles an hour?" says an
engineer. Yes. "Then I will run it reckless of consequences." Can I be a
merchant, and the president of a bank, and a director in a life insurance
company, and a school commissioner, and help edit a paper, and supervise
the politics of our ward, and run for Congress? "I can!" the man says to
himself. The store drives him; the school drives him; politics drive him.
He takes all the scoldings and frets and exasperations of each position.
Some day at the height of the business season he does not come to the
store; from the most important meetings of the bank directors he is absent.
In the excitements of the political canvass he fails to be at the place
appointed. What is the matter? His health has broken down. The train halts
long before it gets to the station. A hot axle!
Literary men have great opportunities opening in this day. If they take all
that open, they are dead men, or worse, living men who ought to be dead.
The pen runs so easy when you have good ink, and smooth paper, and an easy
desk to write on, and the consciousness of an audience of one, two or three
hundred thousand readers. There are the religious newspapers through which
you preach, and the musical journals through which you may sing, and the
agricultural periodicals through which you can plough, and family
newspapers in which you may romp with the whole household around the
evening stand. There are critiques to be written, and reviews to be
indulged in, and poems to be chimed, and novels to be constructed. When out
of a man's pen he can shake recreation, and friendship, and usefulness,
and bread, he is apt to keep it shaking. So great are the invitations to
literary work that the professional men of the day are overcome. They sit
faint and fagged out on the verge of newspapers and books. Each one does
the work of three, and these men sit up late nights, and choke down chunks
of meat without mastication, and scold their wives through irritability,
and maul innocent authors, and run the physical machinery with a liver
miserably given out. The driving shaft has gone fifty times a second. They
stop at no station. The steam-chest is hot and swollen. The brain and the
digestion begin to smoke. Stop, ye flying quills! "Down brakes!" A hot
axle!
Some of the worst tempered people of the day are religious people, from the
fact that they have no rest. Added to the necessary work of the world, they
superintend two Sunday-schools, listen to two sermons, and every night have
meetings of charitable and Christian institutions. They look after the
beggars, hold conventions, speak at meetings, wait on ministers, serve as
committeemen, take all the hypercriticisms that inevitably come to earnest
workers, rush up and down the world and develop their hearts at the expense
of all the other functions. They are the best men on earth, and Satan knows
it, and is trying to kill them as fast as possible. They know not that it
is as much a duty to take care of their health as to go to the sacrament.
It is as much a sin to commit suicide with the sword of truth as with a
pistol.
Our earthly life is a treasure to be guarded, it is an outrageous thing to
die when we ought to live. There is no use in firing up a Cunarder to such
a speed that the boiler bursts mid-Atlantic, when at a more moderate rate
it might have reached the docks at Liverpool. It is a sin to try to do the
work of thirty years in five years.
A Rocky Mountain locomotive engineer told us that at certain places they
change locomotives and let the machine rest, as a locomotive always kept in
full heat soon got out of order. Our advice to all overworked good people
is, "Slow up!" Slacken your speed as you come to the crossings. All your
faculties for work at this rate will be consumed. You are on fire now--see
the premonitory smoke. A hot axle!
Some of our young people have read till they are crazed of learned
blacksmiths who at the forge conquered thirty languages, and of shoemakers
who, pounding sole-leather, got to be philosophers, and of milliners who,
while their customers were at the glass trying on their spring hats, wrote
a volume of first-rate poems. The fact is no blacksmith ought to be
troubled with more than five languages; and instead of shoemakers becoming
philosophers, we would like to turn our surplus of philosophers into
shoemakers; and the supply of poetry is so much greater than the demand
that we wish milliners would stick to their business. Extraordinary
examples of work and endurance may do as much harm as good. Because
Napoleon slept only three hours a night, hundreds of students have tried
the experiment; but instead of Austerlitz and Saragossa, there came of it
only a sick headache and a botch of a recitation. We are told of how many
books a man can read in the five spare minutes before breakfast, and the
ten minutes at noon, but I wish some one could tell us how much rest a man
can get in fifteen minutes after dinner, or how much health in an hour's
horseback ride, or how much fun in a Saturday afternoon of cricket. He who
has such an idea of the value of time that he takes none of it for rest
wastes all his time.
Most Americans do not take time for sufficient sleep. We account for our
own extraordinary health by the fact that we are fanatics on the subject of
sleep. We differ from our friend Napoleon Bonaparte in one respect: we want
nine hours' sleep, and we take it--eight hours at night and one hour in the
day. If we miss our allowance one week, as we often do, we make it up the
next week or the next month. We have sometimes been twenty-one hours in
arrearages. We formerly kept a memorandum of the hours for sleep lost. We
pursued those hours till we caught them. If at the beginning of our summer
vacation we are many hours behind in slumber, we go down to the sea-shore
or among the mountains and sleep a month. If the world abuses us at any
time, we go and take an extra sleep; and when we wake up, all the world is
smiling on us. If we come to a knotty point in our discourse, we take a
sleep; and when we open our eyes, the opaque has become transparent. We
split every day in two by a nap in the afternoon. Going to take that
somniferous interstice, we say to the servants, "Do not call me for
anything. If the house takes fire, first get the children out and my
private papers; and when the roof begins to fall in call me." Through such
fanaticism we have thus far escaped the hot axle.
Somebody ought to be congratulated--I do not know who, and so I will shake
hands all around--on the fact that the health of the country seems
improving. Whether Dio Lewis, with his gymnastic clubs, has pounded to
death American sickness, or whether the coming here of many English ladies
with their magnificent pedestrian habits, or whether the medicines in the
apothecary shops through much adulteration have lost their force, or
whether the multiplication of bathtubs has induced to cleanliness people
who were never washed but once, and that just after their arrival on this
planet, I cannot say. But sure I am that I never saw so many bright,
healthy-faced people as of late.
Our maidens have lost the languor they once cultivated, and walk the street
with stout step, and swing the croquet mallet with a force that sends the
ball through two arches, cracking the opposing ball with great emphasis.
Our daughters are not ashamed to culture flower beds, and while they plant
the rose in the ground a corresponding rose blooms in their own cheek.
But we need another proclamation of emancipation. The human locomotive goes
too fast. Cylinder, driving-boxes, rock-shaft, truck and valve-gear need to
"slow up." Oh! that some strong hand would unloose the burdens from our
over-tasked American life, that there might be fewer bent shoulders, and
pale cheeks, and exhausted lungs, and quenched eyes, the law, and medicine,
and theology less frequently stopped in their glorious progress, because of
the hot axle!