Author: Stephen Leacock
Category: Humorous
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XII. This Strenuous Age
Something is happening, I regret to find, to the world in which we usedto live. The poor old thing is being "speeded up." There is "efficiency"in the air. Offices open at eight o'clock. Millionaires lunch on a bakedapple. Bankers eat practically nothing. A college president has declaredthat there are more foot pounds of energy in a glass of peptonizedmilk than in--something else, I forget what. All this is very fine. Yetsomehow I feel out of it.
My friends are failing me. They won't sit up after midnight. Theyhave taken to sleeping out of doors, on porches and pergolas. Some, Iunderstand, merely roost on plain wooden bars. They rise early. Theytake deep breathing. They bathe in ice water. They are no good.
This change I am sure, is excellent. It is, I am certain, just as itought to be. I am merely saying, quietly and humbly, that I am not init. I am being left behind. Take, for example, the case of alcohol.That, at least, is what it is called now. There were days when we calledit Bourbon whisky and Tom Gin, and when the very name of it breathedromance. That time is past.
The poor stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low that he has a goodword for it. Quite right, I am certain. I don't defend it. Alcohol,they are saying to-day, if taken in sufficient quantities, tears all theouter coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric tissue, so Iam informed, a useless wreck.
This I don't deny. It gets, they tell me, into the brain. I don'tdispute it. It turns the prosencephalon into mere punk. I know it. I'vefelt it doing it. They tell me--and I believe it--that after evenone glass of alcohol, or shall we say Scotch whisky and soda, a man'sworking power is lowered by twenty per cent. This is a dreadful thing.After three glasses, so it is held, his capacity for sustained rigidthought is cut in two. And after about six glasses the man's workingpower is reduced by at least a hundred per cent. He merely sitsthere--in his arm-chair, at his club let us say--with all power,even all _desire_ to work gone out of him, not thinking rigidly, notsustaining his thought, a mere shapeless chunk of geniality, half hiddenin the blue smoke of his cigar.
Very dreadful, not a doubt. Alcohol is doomed; it is going it is gone.Yet when I think of a hot Scotch on a winter evening, or a Tom Collinson a summer morning, or a gin Rickey beside a tennis-court, or a steinof beer on a bench beside a bowling-green--I wish somehow that we couldprohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink beer and whisky and gin aswe used to. But these things, it appears, interfere with work. They havegot to go.
But turn to the broader and simpler question of _work_ itself. In mytime one hated it. It was viewed as the natural enemy of man. Now theworld has fallen in love with it. My friends, I find, take their deepbreathing and their porch sleeping because it makes them work better.They go for a week's vacation in Virginia not for its own sake, butbecause they say they can work better when they get back. I know aman who wears very loose boots because he can work better in them: andanother who wears only soft shirts because he can work better in a softshirt. There are plenty of men now who would wear dog-harness if theythought they could work more in it. I know another man who walks awayout into the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country--hewouldn't recognize a bumble bee if he saw it--but he claims that if hewalks on Sunday his head is as clear as a bell for work on Monday.
Against work itself, I say nothing. But I sometimes wonder if I standalone in this thing. Am I the _only_ person left who hates it?
Nor is work all. Take food. I admit, here and now, that the lunch I likebest--I mean for an ordinary plain lunch, not a party--is a beef steakabout one foot square and two inches thick. Can I work on it? No, Ican't, but I can work in spite of it. That is as much as one used toask, twenty-five years ago.
Yet now I find that all my friends boast ostentatiously about the meagrelunch they eat. One tells me that he finds a glass of milk and a pruneis quite as much as he cares to take. Another says that a dry biscuitand a glass of water is all that his brain will stand. One luncheson the white of an egg. Another eats merely the yolk. I have only twofriends left who can eat a whole egg at a time.
I understand that the fear of these men is that if they eat more thanan egg or a biscuit they will feel heavy after lunch. Why they objectto feeling heavy, I do not know. Personally, I enjoy it. I like nothingbetter than to sit round after a heavy lunch with half a dozen heavyfriends, smoking heavy cigars. I am well aware that that is wicked. Imerely confess the fact. I do not palliate it.
Nor is food all, nor drink, nor work, nor open air. There has spreadabroad along with the so-called physical efficiency a perfect passionfor _information_. Somehow if a man's stomach is empty and his headclear as a bell, and if he won't drink and won't smoke, he reaches outfor information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers all though,instead of only reading the headings. He clamours for articles filledwith statistics about illiteracy and alien immigration and the number ofbattleships in the Japanese navy.
I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the new_Encyclopaedia Britannica_. What is more, they _read_ the thing. Theysit in their apartments at night with a glass of water at their elbowreading the encyclopaedia. They say that it is literally filled withfacts. Other men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract ofthe United States (they say the figures in it are great) and the Actsof Congress, and the list of Presidents since Washington (or was itWashington?).
Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a cold bakedapple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go to work in the morning,so they tell me, with a positive sense of exhilaration. I have no doubtthat they do. But, for me, I confess that once and for all I am out ofit. I am left behind.
Add to it all such rising dangers as total prohibition, and the femalefranchise, the daylight saving, and eugenic marriage, together withproportional representation, the initiative and the referendum, and theduty of the citizen to take an intelligent interest in politics--and Iadmit that I shall not be sorry to go away from here.
But before I _do_ go, I have one hope. I understand that down in Haytithings are very different. Bull fights, cock fights, dog fights, areopenly permitted. Business never begins till eleven in the morning.Everybody sleeps after lunch, and the bars remain open all night.Marriage is but a casual relation. In fact, the general condition ofmorality, so they tell me, is lower in Hayti than it has been anywheresince the time of Nero. Me for Hayti.