“The Fear that Kills."

New Zealand Mail, Issue 810, 9 September 1887, Page 4

“The Fear that Kills."

More temperate diet, more airy bedrooms, better drained houses, and more effectual ablutions, are real improvements on the habits of our ancestors. But the excess to which hygienic precautions are carried, the proportion which such cares now occupy amid the serious interests of life, is becoming absurd, and conducting us rapidly to a state of things wherein, if we are not * killed ’ by fear, we are paralysed by it for all natural enjojm'ent. The old healthful, buoyant spirit seems already fled from the majority, of English homes. Aged people (from this and, no doubt, other concurrent causes) seldom exhibit now that gentle gaiety which so often brightened with hues of sunset the long, calm evening of a wellspent life, after the ‘six days’work ’ was done. The middle-aged are one and all hag-ridden by anxiety; and as to the young, if we may trust the reports which reach us from the great schools, a very marked change has come over them, curiously indicative of the sensitiveness of young souls to the chill breath of the Zeitgeist. The lads have grown colder and harder, and are interested in pecuniary profits rather than in nobler professional ambitions. Nay, we have been told (it is a large demand upon credulity !) that English schoolboys have almost ceased to be reckless about heat or cold, about eating indigestible things, about climbing trees and precipices, about going on deep water in unaeaworthy boats ; in short, about all those pursuits which excited the perennial alarms of their fond mothers. Many boys are to be found, it is stated (I write always under reservation), who may be described as Mollycoddles, so cautious are they about their health and their limbs. Urchins in round jackets speak of the danger of checking perspiration after cricket, and decline to partake of unripe apples and pastry on the never-before-heard-of ground of dyspepsia. Invited in the holidays to the ecstatic ‘ lark ’ of a long excursion on horseback, they have declined with reference to the playfulness of their pony’s heels ; and have been seen to shrink from a puppy’s caressing tongue, murmuring the ominous word * Rabies.’ In short, our girls, who are just acquiring physical courage as a new virtue, are sometimes braver than their brothers, who think it‘good form ’to profess disinclination to risk their valuable persons.—Contemporary Review.