less
frequently clergymen; still less often lawyers; and more rarely doctors;
while distressing cases are apt to occur among the overschooled young of
both sexes.

The worst instances to be met with are among young men suddenly cast
into business positions involving weighty responsibility. I can recall
several cases of men under or just over twenty-one who have lost health
while attempting to carry the responsibilities of great manufactories.
Excited and stimulated by the pride of such a charge, they have worked
with a certain exaltation of brain, and, achieving success, have been
stricken down in the moment of triumph. This too frequent practice of
immature men going into business, especially with borrowed capital, is a
serious evil. The same person, gradually trained to naturally and
slowly increasing burdens, would have been sure of healthy success. In
individual cases I have found it so often vain to remonstrate or to
point out the various habits which collectively act for mischief on our
business class that I may well despair of doing good by a mere general
statement. As I have noted them, connected with cases of overwork, they
are these: late hours of work, irregular meals bolted in haste away from
home, the want of holidays and of pursuits outside of business, and the
consequent practice of carrying home, as the only subject of talk, the
cares and successes of the counting-house and the stock-board. Most of
these evil habits require no comment. What, indeed, can be said? The man
who has worked hard all day, and lunched or dined hastily, comes home or
goes to the club to converse--save the mark!--about goods and stocks.
Holidays, except in summer, he knows not, and it is then thought time
enough taken from work if the man sleeps in the country and comes into a
hot city daily, or at the best has a week or two at the sea-shore. This
incessant monotony tells in the end. Men have confessed to me that for
twenty years they had worked every day, often travelling at night or on
Sundays to save time, and that in all this period they had not taken one
day for play. These are extreme instances, but they are also in a
measure representative of a frightfully general social evil.

Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There
comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they
get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and
just as they are thinking, "Now we