ng that complete
and prolonged cessation from work is the one thing needful. Not a week
of holiday, or a month, but probably a year or more of utter idleness
may be absolutely essential. Only this will answer in cases so extreme
as that which I have tried to depict, and even this will not always
insure a return to a state of active working health.

I am very far from conceding that the vehement energy with which we do
our work is due altogether to greed. We probably idle less and play less
than any other race, and the absence of national habits of sport,
especially in the West, leaves the man of business with no inducement to
abandon that unceasing labor in which at last he finds his sole
pleasure. He does not ride, or shoot, or fish, or play any game but
euchre. Business absorbs him utterly, and at last he finds neither time
nor desire for books. The newspaper is his sole literature; he has never
had time to acquire a taste for any reading save his ledger. Honest
friendship for books comes with youth or, as a rule, not at all. At last
his hour of peril arrives. Then you may separate him from business, but
you will find that to divorce his thoughts from it is impossible. The
fiend of work he raised no man can lay. As to foreign travel, it
wearies him. He has not the culture which makes it available or
pleasant. Notwithstanding the plasticity of the American, he is now
without resources. What then to advise I have asked myself countless
times. Let him at least look to it that his boys go not the same evil
road. The best business men are apt to think that their own successful
careers represent the lives their children ought to follow, and that the
four years of college spoil a lad for business. In reality these years,
be they idle or well filled with work, give young men the custom of
play, and surround them with an atmosphere of culture which leaves them
with bountiful resources for hours of leisure, while they insure to them
in these years of growth wholesome, unworried freedom from such business
pressure as the successful parent is so apt to put on too youthful
shoulders.

Somewhat distracted by the desire to be brief, and yet to tell the whole
story, I have sought, in what I fear is a very loose and disconnected
way, to put in a new light some of the evils which are hurting the
mothers of our race, and those which every day's experience teaches the
doctor are gravely affecting the working capacity of numberless men.