All Work

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ALL WORK.

Miss Beecher,¹ in her popular work on physiology, laments the general decay of health among American women. She says, and truly, according to our own experience, that a healthy American female is rapidly becoming rara avis in terris—that nine out of ten of our fair-featured, but frail-constitutioned sisters, wives and mothers, are weak, debilitated, and unfit for the burdens of life—beautiful at eighteen—confirmed invalids at thirty.

We fear there is but too much reason in the accusation, sweeping as it may appear. But how lamentable is such a state of things! How it strikes at the very root of our prosperity—our very existence. The mothers of the next generation! What a frequent phrase—what a deep signification permeates every word and letter!

Come, let us reason together. Let us see if we cannot find some reasonable solution of this problem of the early decay of the health and vitality of the men and women of These States.

Is it climate? Undoubtedly climate has something to do with it. Its sudden changes, which are almost impossible to guard against, are racking to the constitution and productive of no small amount of disease. Without doubt a variable climate is a superinducing cause of a good proportion of those lung diseases which make such deadly havoc among us. Nevertheless it is but one cause—not all. Neither is it the chief.

Is it to be attributed to the dissipation of our youth—to the secluded habits of our females? These are also causes, and grave ones, but still, they are not all.

The great trouble with our people—especially “city men,” merchants, lawyers, professional and business men of all classes, is that they work themselves to death. Affairs are conducted on such a high-pressure principle that recreation itself is stimulating and most wearing to the nerves. The long vacations, the quiet domestic retreat after the labors of the day which recuperate the energies of the same classes in other counties, are almost unknown here; or quite a different thing is substituted for them under the same name.

“All work and no play.” Our very amusements are laborious, and some of them rather more fatiguing than labor. Fashion, display—conventional humbugs of all sorts—are substituted for rational, healthful, inspiriting, health-giving recreation.

Thank Heaven, there is plenty of good stuff left in the great South and West—up among the granite hills of the sturdy New England States and in the rich valleys of the interior, to balance the wicked waste of nerve and tissue in our great cities. We once heard a celebrated physician remark, in speaking of the decay of health in metropolitan life,—“I should despair of my country, if it were not for the country.” The remark was just and sagacious.

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