he different
provinces of the little man-kingdom do their work. This something--call
it nervous fluid, nervous power, vital energy, life-force, or anything
else that you will--is a perfectly understood, if not a definable thing.
It is plain, too, that people possess this force in very different
degrees: some generating it as a high-pressure engine does steam, and
using it constantly, with an apparently inexhaustible flow; and others
who have little, and spend it quickly. We have a common saying, that
this or that person is soon used up. Now most nervous, irritable states
of temper are the mere physical result of a used-up condition. The
person has overspent his nervous energy,--like a man who should eat up
on Monday the whole food which was to keep him for a week, and go
growling and faint through the other days; or the quantity of nervous
force which was wanted to carry on the whole system in all its parts is
seized on by some one monopolizing portion, and used up to the loss and
detriment of the rest, Thus, with men of letters, an exorbitant brain
expends on its own workings what belongs to the other offices of the
body: the stomach has nothing to carry on digestion; the secretions are
badly made; and the imperfectly assimilated nourishment, that is
conveyed to every little nerve and tissue, carries with it an acrid,
irritating quality, producing general restlessness and discomfort. So
men and women go struggling on through their three-score and ten years,
scarcely one in a thousand knowing through life that perfect balance of
parts, that appropriate harmony of energies, that make a healthy, kindly
animal condition, predisposing to cheerfulness and good-will.

We Americans are, to begin with, a nervous, excitable people. Multitudes
of children, probably the great majority in the upper walks of life, are
born into the world with weaknesses of the nervous organization, or of
the brain or stomach, which make them incapable of any strong excitement
or prolonged exertion without some lesion or derangement; so that they
are continually being checked, laid up, and invalided in the midst of
their drugs. Life here in America is so fervid, so fast, our climate is
so stimulating, with its clear, bright skies, its rapid and sudden
changes of temperature, that the tendencies to nervous disease are
constantly aggravated.

Under these circumstances, unless men and women make a conscience, a
religion, of saving and sparing something