The Fundamentals feverish hurry and hustle of our American people! Ian Maclaren wrote thus about us: “I am now in New York, where everybody seems to be in a hurry. I asked a police man what the excitement was all about. He thought I was joking. No one walks to business who can ride in a street car ; none rides in a street car who can ride in a steam car, and he regrets there is no pneumatic tube by which he might be shot to his office or shop. When there, he does not write letters if he can telegraph, or telegraph if he can telephone, and regrets there is no occupation for his feet while waiting at the phone.” There is magnetism in our oxygen which stimulates our blood and explains our American push and rush. H . , . , The difficulty, with our splendid American activity and achievement, is to arrest the momentum. Men rush so hard through the week that the Day of Rest finds them in the rush ing mood. It is hard to stop. They want to do something or go somewhere, or keep up the pace by some dissipating use of the Lord’s Day. Hence the Sunday excursions which gen erally make an incursion into the week’s wages, and leave the working man more tired on that night than any other of t e week. And there are Sunday amusements and dinner parties and receptions. But the human organism is not a machine of iron to run without rest, but a delicate bundle of nerves and tissues. But even iron machinery does better work and lasts ionger when it has periodic rests, as the superintendent of the Pennsylvania railroad said recently about their locomotives. . THE MIND NEEDS IT Second, man has a mind. I t is a fact of common record that no set of men can keep working the same mental tread mill day after day without blunting the keen edge of their intellectual faculties. Note the employees who are held at their monotonous grind seven days out of seven, month after month, and you will observe that the average intelligence and
8
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker