Prince Wolkonsky, during a visit to this country, declared that
"Business is the alpha and omega of American life. There is no pleasure,
no joy, no satisfaction. There is no standard except that of profit.
There is no other country where they speak of a man as worth so many
dollars. In other countries they live to enjoy life; here they exist for
business." A Boston merchant corroborated this statement by saying he
was anxious all day about making money, and worried all night for fear
he should lose what he had made.
"In the United States," a distinguished traveler once said, "there is
everywhere comfort, but no joy. The ambition of getting more and
fretting over what is lost absorb life."
"Every man we meet looks as if he'd gone out to borrow trouble, with
plenty of it on hand," said a French lady, upon arriving in New York.
"The Americans are the best-fed, the best-clad, and the best-housed
people in the world," says another witness, "but they are the most
anxious; they hug possible calamity to their breasts."
"I question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly on the
faces of any other population," says Emerson; "old age begins in the
nursery."
How quickly we Americans exhaust life! With what panting haste we pursue
everything! Every man you meet seems to be late for an appointment.
Hurry is stamped in the wrinkles of the national face. We are men of
action; we go faster and faster as the years go by, speeding our
machinery to the utmost. Bent forms, prematurely gray hair, restlessness
and discontent, are characteristic of our age and people. We earn our
bread, but cannot digest it; and our over-stimulated nerves soon become
irritated, and touchiness follows,--so fatal to a business man, and so
annoying in society.
"It is not work that kills men," says Beecher; "it is worry. Work is
healthy; you can hardly put more on a man than he can bear. But worry is
rust upon the blade. It is not movement that destroys the machinery, but
friction."
It is not so much the great sorrows, the great burdens, the great
hardships, the great calamities, that cloud over the sunshine of life,
as the little petty vexations, insignificant anxieties and fear, the
little daily dyings, which render our lives unhappy, and destroy our
mental elasticity, without advancing our life-work one inch. "Anxiety
never yet bridged any chasm."
"What," asks Dr. George W. Jacoby, in an "Evening Post" interview, "is
the ultimate physical effect of worry? Why, the same as that of a fatal
bullet-wound or sword-thrust. Worry kills as surely, though not so
quickly, as ever gun or dagger did, and more people have died in the
last century from sheer worry than have been killed in battle."
Dr. Jacoby is one of the foremost of American brain doctors. "The
investigations of the neurologists," he says, "have laid bare no secret
of Nature in recent years more startling and interesting than the
discovery that worry kills." This is the final, up-to-date word. "Not
only is it known," resumes the great neurologist, counting off his
words, as it were, on his finger-tips, "that worry kills, but the most
minute details of its murderous methods are familiar to modern
scientists. It is a common belief of those who have made a special study
of the science of brain diseases that hundreds of deaths attributed to
other causes each year are due simply to worry. In plain, untechnical
language, worry works its irreparable injury through certain cells of
the brain life. The insidious inroads upon the system can be best
likened to the constant falling of drops of water in one spot. In the
brain it is the insistent, never-lost idea, the single, constant
thought, centered upon one subject, which in the course of time destroys
the brain cells. The healthy brain can cope with occasional worry; it is
the iteration and reiteration of disquieting thoughts which the cells of
the brain cannot successfully combat.
"The mechanical effect of worry is much the same as if the skull were
laid bare and the brain exposed to the action of a little hammer beating
continually upon it day after day, until the membranes are disintegrated
and the normal functions disabled. The maddening thought that will not
be downed, the haunting, ever-present idea that is not or cannot be
banished by a supreme effort of the will, is the theoretical hammer
which diminishes the vitality of the sensitive nerve organisms, the
minuteness of which makes them visible to the eye only under a powerful
microscope. The 'worry,' the thought, the single idea grows upon one as
time goes on, until the worry victim cannot throw it off. Through this,
one set or area of cells is affected. The cells are intimately
connected, joined together by little fibres, and they in turn are in
close relationship with the cells of the other parts of the brain.
"Worry is itself a species of monomania. No mental attitude is more
disastrous to personal achievement, personal happiness, and personal
usefulness in the world, than worry and its twin brother, despondency.
The remedy for the evil lies in training the will to cast off cares and
seek a change of occupation, when the first warning is sounded by Nature
in intellectual lassitude. Relaxation is the certain foe of worry, and
'don't fret' one of the healthiest of maxims."
In a life of constant worrying, we are as much behind the times as if we
were to go back to use the first steam engines that wasted ninety per
cent. of the energy of the coal, instead of having an electric dynamo
that utilizes ninety per cent. of the power. Some people waste a large
percentage of their energy in fretting and stewing, in useless anxiety,
in scolding, in complaining about the weather and the perversity of
inanimate things. Others convert nearly all of their energy into power
and moral sunshine. He who has learned the true art of living will not
waste his energies in friction, which accomplishes nothing, but merely
grinds out the machinery of life.
It must be relegated to the debating societies to determine which is the
worse--A Nervous Man or