Holidays, except in summer, he knows not, and it is then thought time
enough taken from work if the man sleeps in the country and comes into a
hot city daily, or at the best has a week or two at the sea-shore. This
incessant monotony tells in the end. Men have confessed to me that for
twenty years they had worked every day, often travelling at night or on
Sundays to save time, and that in all this period they had not taken one
day for play. These are extreme instances, but they are also in a
measure representative of a frightfully general social evil.
Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There
comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they
get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and
just as they are thinking, "Now we will stop and enjoy ourselves," the
brain, which, slave-like, never murmurs until it breaks out into open
insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done. There
are therefore two periods of existence especially prone to those
troubles,--one when the mind is maturing; another at the turning-point
of life, when the brain has attained its fullest power, and has left
behind it accomplished the larger part of its best enterprise and most
active labor.
I am disposed to think that the variety of work done by lawyers, their
long summer holiday, their more general cultivation, their usual tastes
for literary or other objects out of their business walks, may, to some
extent, save them, as well as the fact that they can rarely be subject
to the sudden and fearful responsibilities of business men.
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