never for an instant think of testing their honesty? The most desirable young men for clerks are not always the most prepossessing at first. There is an urbanity, the result of good principles and good-breeding, which is instantly recognized by the practised eye, and which is rarely found dissociated from good sense and sterling integrity. This kind of politeness is not put on and off like a cloak, nor is it characterized by any of the dazzling fripperies of demeanor which distinguish the "swells" just referred to. Let employers learn to distinguish between the real article and the counterfeit; let them take no young man into their employment about whose antecedents they are not fully posted; let them pay fair, even liberal, salaries; and especially let them, so far as they can do so without establishing a system of espionage, which is always despicable, acquaint themselves with the conduct and pursuits of their officials outside of the salesroom or counting-house, and they will not only save themselves from the loss of many dollars, perhaps from bankruptcy, but will prevent many a young man, trembling on the brink of temptation, from going headlong to ruin.

Finally, in addition to the causes of bankruptcy which we have mentioned might be added bad personal habits, such as intemperance, lack of punctuality, etc.; the expenditure of capital in costly fixtures and expensive ornaments, "a device of rich old traders to monopolize a business by throwing obstacles in the way of men with limited capital"; a lack of attention to details; and many others upon which we have not space to dwell. But farther back - behind boundless credits, overtrading, speculation, luxurious living, and all the other causes which we have named or might name is to be found the primary cause of mercantile failures, all these secondary ones. being but the effect of elements lying deeper in the popular character. Mammon-worship, devotion to "the almighty dollar," the intense, all-devouring ambition to be the Napoleon of the mart, the man who owns a greater amount of real estate, bank and railroad stocks, and solid cash or mortgages, than any other man on 'Change; the impatience to attain to

wealth by a few brilliant and daring strokes, instead of by tedious processes of labor and economy, by a few gigantic bounds, instead of by a slow and tedious up-hill journey; the subordination of health and happiness, the highest interests of body and soul, to money, money, MONEY, which is made the end instead of the means of existence, this is the root from which spring not merely the marvellous activity, but the giant vices, of the American mercantile character. The race after riches in this country is not a healthy, bracing race, but a steeplechase, a headlong, maddening rush. It is the rush of a forlorn hope to an "imminent deadly breach," to a breach in the citadel of Mammon with its defences of thick competition, mounds of bankruptcy, pitfalls of speculation, and files of bad debts, besieged by a magazine of capital, with the large artillery of wholesale business and the small guns of retail. The end and aim of each, captains and privates, is to be the first to mount the breach and plant his victorious standard on the walls. Away with the cold dictates of virtue and prudence and honor! Fling honesty to the winds. Extend no helping hand to your comrades sinking by your side. Think only of your own safety, and less of that than of the glorious end you have in view. Press on with all your energies, though the balls rain thick and fast about your ears. Stop not to stanch your wounds. Make a bridge, if necessary, of your dead and dying companions, and when you have carried the stronghold of Mammon, plant your flag on its topmost battlement, look around with a smile of triumphant satisfaction, and say, "I'm a rich man !"

CHAPTER XX.

OVERWORK AND UNDER-REST.

Steads not, to work on the clean jump,

Nor wine nor brains perpetual pump. R. W. EMERSON.

The deepest-rooted cause of American disease is that overworking of the brain and over-excitement of the nervous system, which are the necessary consequences of their intense activity. Hence nervous dyspepsia, with consumption, insanity, and all its brood of fell disorders in its train. In a word, the American works himself to death. JAMES STIRLING.

....

The body has its claims, it is a good servant; treat it well, and it will do your work; attend to its wants and requirements, listen kindly and patiently to its hints, occasionally forestall its necessities by a little indul. gence, and your consideration will be repaid with interest. But task it and pine it and suffocate it, make it a slave instead of a servant, it may not complain much, but, like the weary camel in the desert, it will lie down and die. - CHARLES ELAM, A Physician's Problems.

A

N able London journal* has an article on the subject of Drudgery, in which it protests against the modern and absurd notion that work is an intrinsic good, or what moralists call an end. The modern revival of the dogma of the nobleness of work it thinks was well, but it has been pushed too far. The worship of work for its own sake it pronounces mere fetichism, and almost as pernicious an extreme as the antiquated and now comparatively unfashionable worship of idleness.

We deeply sympathize with this protest, which was never more urgently needed than at this hour. Everywhere men are killing themselves by overwork, by intense, exhausting labor of hand and brain; and the remonstrance has come not a moment too soon. The life of the present day is lived at feverheat. There is a fierce struggle going on in all the departments of labor, and the mental wear and tear is enormous. Life, in all of the professions, is literally a battle, and men are falling

* The Saturday Review.

by hundreds in the thick of the fight. The desire to get rich in a few years, the pride of doing "an immense business," or of being the leader of the bar or the medical profession, leads thousands "to work double tides"; and they go stumbling on, robbing themselves of sleep and rest and play, till they break down into an insane asylum or into the grave.

Welcome, then, to the later gospel, which proclaims that work is not an end in itself, much less the highest earthly good. Far nearer the truth is the doctrine of Moses and of the most ancient cosmogonists, that work is a primeval curse, the result of sin. The curse may, indeed, like all human afflictions, be turned into a blessing; but a curse, nevertheless, it is in itself, and only to be borne because the alternative of idleness is infinitely worse. Work, when worshipped as it sometimes is by its servants, or when compelled by avarice, impatience, or early follies, too often degenerates into drudgery, and its most enthusiastic eulogists will not pretend that it is then a blessing. There is nothing in drudgery that is fitted to produce happiness or beauty of character. On the contrary, its tendency is to mar all that is fair and lovely in the most cultivated natures.

Of all the nations of the earth there is no one among whom this doctrine of "grind" has taken deeper root than among us Americans. From the days of the Puritans we have been excessively fond of work, work, not as a means of getting a living only, but in itself and for its own sake. It seems as if we felt the primeval curse ever weighing upon us, and so we continue to drudge like galley-slaves, even after we have provided for the ever-dreaded "rainy day," and the pressure of bread-getting has long since passed. Hence we have so few holidays and seasons of rest or recreation, that, when they do come, we are quite perplexed to know what to do with ourselves. It is for the same reason that these days are grossly abused by many in riotous dissipation, drunkenness, and oth erwise swamping themselves with abominations; for, as an old writer says, those that seldom take lawful pleasure will take unlawful," and by lacing themselves too hard, grow awry

on one side."

Others, again, alternate a long spell of excessive labor with a comparatively short spell of excessive repose, eleven months in the treadmill with one at Saratoga, - which is about as rational as to maintain that a man who has taken a bottle of brandy one day and a quart of water the next has been drinking brandy and water.

When shall we learn that, as Aristotle long ago said, the end of labor is to gain leisure: and that hence it is possible to be just as immoderately and evilly addicted to work as to indulgence, and that an equal amount, though a different kind of mischief, may accrue to one's self and family in one direction as in the other? When will the old theological idea that mortals are sent here as to a place of sore chastisement and mortification be scouted from our minds? It is time that this everlasting drudgery should cease among us, and that some higher lesson should be impressed upon the brain of the infantile Yankee than the old saws about industry, money-getting, and the like. Let us abate something, at least, of our devotion to the almighty dollar, and regard the world as something better than a huge workshop, in which we are to toil and moil unceasingly, till death stops the human machine. Let us learn that the surest and best way to get on in the world is not to travel by "lightning lines," but "to hasten slowly." It is a libel on Providence to suppose that it has designed that we should live such a plodding, mechanical life, that we should be mere mill-horses, treading evermore the same dull, unvarying round, and all for grist, grist, still grist, till we have become as blind and stupid as that most unhappy of all quadrupeds. more absurd is it to suppose that to work desperately, to be intensely employed, is in itself praiseworthy, even though it be about something which has no truth, beauty, or usefulness in it, and which makes no man happier or wiser. The truth is, that, as one of the wisest of modern essayists has remarked, to work insatiably requires much less mind than to work judiciously, and less courage than to refuse work that cannot be done honestly. "For a hundred men," says Arthur Helps,

Still