Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/525

Rh may be well deserved, yet fall upon a nature that can feel it. Pain may be incurable, for it may arise from causes — as for instance, in one terrible case we now, the protrusion of a small spicula of bone into the brain — which science can detect but cannot reach, and which are beyond all human power. But pecuniary distress can never seem absolutely beyond hope. A mere accident might relieve it, as has often happened after the sufferer, unknowing of the fortune on its way, has taken the fatal plunge; or a slight increase of earning-power, or the opening of a new groove in life, or, and this is strangest of all, the development, constantly seen in women who have lost money, of a new power of doing without wants. Mrs. Gaskell paints that well in "Cranford," and we have seen a heavier fall than even Miss Matty Jenkyns's, a fall from £300 a year to £30, met by a sudden slaughter of all needs that bade defiance to pecuniary misfortune. And yet there can scarcely be a doubt that pecuniary trouble is of all troubles the one that most absorbs its victim, that most completely destroys his strength, that most certainly evolves the despairing sense of loneliness which is the precursor and the cause of suicide. The reason of this special effect of this particular trouble, is worth seeking, and is not very far to seek. Pecuniary trouble is one of the very few forms of misery which, while it involves all others or nearly all others — for it does not always, though it does frequently, involve remorse — is permanently present. Doctors know well that there is no form of the many mental sufferings caused by dyspepsia or by incipient insanity so dangerous or so terrible as that known in the profession as timor mortis. The wildest hallucinations may be removed by a careful exposure of their absurdity. The most real terrors may be abolished by the removal of their cause. The most ingenious delusions — and delusions are often ingenious, the mind seeming to take an independent pride in proving to itself that its absurdities are not unreasonable — may be lightened of their pressure by adroitness ; for example, imaginary heart-disease may cease to frighten when it is accepted and treated as disease of the heart, but timor mortis can be removed only by returning health. No argument can demonstrate that death will not come; no one can keep the signs of death — funerals, for example — from reaching the patient's eyes; no teaching can show that death cannot happen at the very moment when the sufferer is waiting to be taught. The suffering is permanent, always present, never less, and so is that of pecuniary pressure. The man or woman who feels it feels it always, to-day as yesterday, waking or asleep, in pleasure or pain, and will, he thinks, feel it yet more intensely to-morrow. It is a terror, and unlike most terrors, which grow less as they are steadily faced, it is an accumulative one, the end seeming ever to draw nearer, till the imagination, weary of suspense, leaps at once to the worst, and realizes on the Continent starvation, and in England the workhouse, as if it had already arrived. Either end, if it came at once, would probably be faced — for men face death or the workhouse as they do not face pecuniary pressure — but the long-continued strain is too much for most nerves, and the mind gives way to the pressure of protracted despair. The fortitude which could encounter the actual evil is worn out long before the evil arrives, and the blow at last descends upon a mind ready to give way at the faintest impact. It is this long continued tension which accounts for the strange unreasonableness which men in difficulty often show about their affairs, their inability to believe that things can go right, or that they can be mistaken as to the extent of the pressure; and also for the still more strange desire to remove wife and children from the danger involved in the advancing calamity, the one calamity which seems to so many men to turn murder into an act of beneficent self-sacrifice. "What will become of the children when I am gone?" is a thought which tortures many a father and mother, but it is only when the fate dreaded is poverty that the torture becomes so intolerable, that the sufferer in his madness seeks a false relief in unselfish crime.

Tension is, we believe, the secret of the insanity so often produced by pecuniary trouble, but the inquiry must still be pushed one step further back. Why is the tension so extreme? Why do men and especially men just outside the limit of poverty, fear poverty so much more, especially for others, than they fear still graver evils? Why, for instance, will a father, half-maddened by the idea that his daughter will be reduced to manual labour, remain comparatively tranquil when informed that all the symptoms which indicate cancer are present in the object of his affection? The popular answer that poverty in our artificial state of 