Publication, dead.

Can now get missing now,

HALL'S

JOURNAL OF HEALTH

HEALTH-THE POOR MAN'S RICHES, THE RICH MAN'S BLISS.

VOL. XLI.

APRIL, 1894.

No. 4.

PREMATURE DEATHS.

If the six articles which follow are maturely considered it will be found that very many premature deaths, whether by suicide or other forms of violence, or by disease, are traceable to moral causes; hence it is as much our duty to avoid these as it is to avoid and guard against the physical causes of disease and death. The suicides in France now average ten a day; the number for the present century, thus far, is over three hundred and fifty thousand. Not a day passes in which a suicide may not be directly traced to want of success in life; to the false moralities inculcated by wicked or ignorant writers; to the failure of parents in obtaining a proper influence over their children; to unrestrained appetites and passions; and to the inability of multitudes to get along in the world" prosperously for want of thoroughness of preparation for their calling or station in life.

SUCCESS IN LIFE.

THE EDITOR.

If to obtain wealth is success we see men around us who have accumulated fortunes, who have no remarkable talent, no special high moral character; in fact, in general intelligence, in elevation of sentiment, in breadth of view, they are pitifully deficient; while men immeasurably their superior in every great and good quality, have never made and saved a dollar.

Then again, every now and then we meet with a man who seems to have prospered in everything he ever attempted, while his next door neighbor, apparently in everything his equal, if not his superior, fails in every undertaking; every effort to rise is sure to result in a more hopeless fall. Able and worthy men ought not to feel discouraged nor cast down, nor to whelm themselves with self-mistrust or self

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reproaches; for the very foolhardiness of some men, and the stupidity of others, in not seeing palpable obstacles and dangers, is the father of their successes, while every succeeding one is the result of that morale, as the French term it, which attaches itself to great accome plishments. In very many cases the accumulation of fortunes is thmerest chance; the result of a fire, or famine, or flood, or pestilence, or sword, or from inheritance; in such there is no sort of credit due to pecuniary success. In other cases, men make money by virtue of that utter abnegation of all moral principle which belongs to the most depraved mind; temptations to which debasements frequently present themselves to the noble-hearted, but are spurned the moment they are proffered and are rejected without an effort, for it is far sweeter to them to live in destitution than to dress in fine linen and fare sumptuously every day at the cost of self-degradation and of prostituted honor.

There are a few men, however, who grow rapidly rich by the force of a perspicacity, a singleness of purpose, and an energy of will, which would have made them distinguished in any department of human life in any pursuit to which they may have been directed; upon such men we ought not to look with envy, but with respect, and while we should admire them the more we ought not to think of ourselves the less, for all the great pecuniary difference, as long as we have been fast in our integrity in every strait and in every temptation. But suppose we have failed a dozen times, who knows but that it may be with us as it has been with multitudes before us, that past adverses are the foundations, constitute the elements, of future success, the very schoolings to great accomplishments.

Let every man be diligent and abide his time in patience, remembering that the race is not commonly, in practical life, to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; and that ultimate and permanent success is the pretty sure reward of him who has patience, diligence and a great heart. PROF. A. F. KINGSLEY.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF WRITERS.

The man dressed in spotless white will not fail to have his garments blackened if he mingles among a crowd of sweeps.

There are clergymen who cannot feel authorized to occupy the pulpit of persons claiming to be clergymen, too, for fear it should be construed to countenance the supposed errors of the latter.

No man of position can allow himself to associate, without prejudice, with the profane, the Sabbath-breaker, the drunken and the licentious, for he lowers himself without elevating them. The sweep is not made the less black by rebbing against the well dressed and the clean, while they are inevitably defiled. If a good man buys a bad book, or writes a commendatory preface to a bad publication, he in a measure endorses its sentiments. To write an article, be it ever so good, for a periodical, each number of which is in the main filled. with third-rate fictions, or even first-rate fictions, is to endorse that publication in the main.

If a good man writes for such in the hope of slipping in a wholesome truth now and then where it would not be otherwise done at all, it is as if he coated a poisonous pill with sugar, or mingled a serpent's venom with honey-the poison and the venom are too predominating; they still destroy, while the sweetness is all lost.

If able men, for a dollar or two a page, or column, will write for flash newspapers and flash magazines which, without their fictions of words and falsehoods of pictures, would not sell at all, they simply aid to bolster up a lie and pander to the credulities of an ignorant public. To palm off the picture of an artist's brain for that of an actual occurrence, to give the portraits of the passe and the dead for those of living criminals, is a falsehood and a cheat, as much as the publication of a fiction for an actual fact. It is only the pictures and the twaddle of loungers which keep up the most pretentious monthly in the land; and the fictions, with the secret infidelities of the next best, its pantheisms and its gibes at religion and religious people, are barely able to keep it above water.

All of them are destined to founder if they do not change. As they are, the sooner they sink the better for the community; and the influence of the few good men who write a paragraph now and then for them will sink with them to that extent; while, by aiding to bolster up a moral nuisance they may find against them a handwriting on the wall when the curtain has fallen and the orgies have broken up. KIRKE WHITE.

INFLUENCE OF MOTHERS.

John Randolph never ceased, to his dying day, to remember with unutterable affection the pious care of his mother in teaching him to kneel at her side and with his little hands pressed together and raised upwards, to repeat in slow and measured accents the pattern prayer.

"My mother," said a prominent man before he died, "asked me not to drink liquor, and I never did. She desired me at another time to avoid gambling, and I never knew a card. She hoped I would not use tobacco, and it never passed my lips." Not long ago a prominent divine of the metropolis, in one of his powerful appeals to mothers to consecrate their children to the ministry of the Gospel, said: “A youth, after great deliberation and with the knowledge that his mother desired him to be a clergyman, decided at last to become a lawyer ; and soon after his mother inquired of him in a tone of deep and tender interest, 'My son, what have you decided to do?' 'To study law, mother.' She only replied, 'I had hoped otherwise;' and her convulsive sobbing told the depth of her disappointment. Do you think,

said he, 'I could go into the law over my mother's tears?' He reconsidered the case and has long been an able and efficient clergyman."

All that that man was in after years he attributed to the simplicity and propriety with which his mother endeavored to win his attention and store his memory with religious truths when yet almost an infant. Oh! if Christian mothers would but wake up to the use of their powers and their influences, a Samuel might arise out of every family and the example of this man be numbered by the thousands. HARRIET W. STEWART.

UNSKILLED LABOR.

It would be a grand thing for society if the apprenticeship system of seventy-five years ago could be resuscitated with modifications. A law would have its advantages which would prohibit mechanics from setting up a shop for themselves until a certain number of years had been spent in learning a trade. The want of something of this sort is diminishing daily the number of competent mechanics in every branch of human labor which requires intelligence and skill. Its workings is as follows: A boy goes to "learn a trade." About the time it is half done he begins to feel as if he knew all about it, and with that there comes a pride, a groundless independence and confidence in himself; the next step is to take offence at some trifling thing, and he "goes off" to become a "boss" himself. His next plan is by "low prices" to get custom, but he would soon starve if with these low prices he did not purchase a correspondingly inferior article to work with, and with this incomplete knowledge added to bad materials, "a bad job is made of it." People soon find him out and simply let him alone, and he is