There seems no doubt that _we are each and all of us to some
extent victims of habit-neurosis_. We have to admit the wider
potential range and the habitually narrow actual use. We live subject
to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to
obey. Most of us may learn to push the barrier farther off, and to
live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.

Country people and city people, as a class, illustrate this difference.
The rapid rate of life, the number of decisions in an hour, the many
things to keep account of, in a busy city man's or woman's life, seem
monstrous to a country brother. He does n't see how we live at all. A
day in New York or Chicago fills him with terror. The danger and noise
make it appear like a permanent earthquake. But _settle_ him there,
and in a year or two he will have caught the pulse-beat. He will
vibrate to the city's rhythms; and if he only succeeds in his
avocation, whatever that may be, he will find a joy in all the hurry
and the tension, he will keep the pace as well as any of us, and get as
much out of himself in any week as he ever did in ten weeks in the
country.

The stimuli of those who successfully spend and undergo the
transformation here, are duty, the example of others, and
crowd-pressure and contagion. The transformation, moreover, is a
chronic one: the new level of energy becomes permanent. The duties of
new offices of trust are constantly producing this effect on the human
beings appointed to them. The physiologists call a stimulus
"dynamogenic" when it increases the muscular contractions of men to
whom it is applied; but appeals can be dynamogenic morally as well as
muscularly. We are witnessing here in America to-day the dynamogenic
effect of a very exalted political office upon the energies of an
individual who had already manifested a healthy amount of energy before
the office came.

Humbler examples show perhaps still better what chronic effects duty's
appeal may produce in chosen individuals. John Stuart Mill somewhere
says that women excel men in the power of keeping up sustained moral
excitement. Every case of illness nursed by wife or mother is a proof
of this; and where can one find greater examples of sustained endurance
than in those thousands of poor homes, where the woman successfully
holds the family together and keeps it going by taking all the thought
and doing all the work--nursing, teaching, cooking, was