"DYING IN HARNESS."
TT is, we believe, admitted on all hands that the great physician, whose loss West London this week so heartily deplores, died substantially from overwork. With his intense though not robust vitality, Sir Andrew Clark might have lived ten years more at least, but that he burned the candle up too fast. It was his own choice. He was accustomed to say, pretty publicly, that he would die in harness," and. to the last hour of his healthy life he performed the work of two men. He saw patients three hours before most of his rivals were ready for them ; he bestowed upon every dangerous case the attention a young physician bestows on his first patient; and he performed voluntary duties for the profession, espe- cially as President of the College of Physicians, it/ such a way that a certain prejudice, born originally of his amazing popu- larity with aristocratic patients, died silently away. Ile had no direct warning, beyond one fit of giddiness, that he was exhausting his reserves of strength ; yet he must have known fairly well, with his professional skill and his ex- ceeding common-sense, that he was doing too much for safety ; and the question is, whether his instinctive conclu- sion to a mental argument, "I would rather die in harness," was or was not a justifiable one. It is not a question, be it remembered, of abstract ethics, but one of ever-increasing social importance. Of all the social changes of our time, this one—the increasing reluctance of professional and bueiness men to retire from active work—is probably the most marked. The old idea that a man at sixty ought to be content with his gains and stop work, has, except as a basis for official schemes of compulsory retirement, utterly died away. Three distinct changes have operated together to make a grand alteration both in opinion and in practice. In the first place, the health of the cultivated has improved, especially in the later years of life, so much, that work can be done, and done well, by men of seventy, which, only half-a-century ago, men of sixty would have hesitated to undertake. The judgment is as clear, the insight as keen, and the power of absorbing new facts nearly as great as ever. The cultivated are old, in the ancient sense, at seventy-five, and feeble at eighty,—that is, half a genera- tion, at least, later than used to be the ease. In the second place, the idea of the duty of "making one's soul "in idleness has died out of moral teaching, and the pious think that they can reflect, and pray, and repent all the better because they are not consumed by ennui or tormented by the rather inane chat which is apt to become the occupation of the "retired." And in the third, it is far more. difficult than it was to be careless of professional gains. Business men occasionally make more than was at all frequent in the forties, but pro- fessional men ale not, and the decline in the rate of interest obtainable for savings has cut their fortunes in two. They cannot get 3 per cent, clear where, in. 1840, they could get 5 per cent, or even, with courage and a little luck, a secure 6 per cent. The tendency therefore, for every reason, is to die in harness, and it is increased by a cause which is, we are assured, felt and acknowledged on all hands, but which is seldom discussed. With the great enlargement of society, with the growing complexity of all affairs, and with the new width of education, work— especially work like the physician's, the lawyer's, the ecclesi- astic's, or the journalist's — has become decidedly more interesting, gives more varied excitement, and contrasts more directly with the comparatively immobile life of the country- man, or even of the citizen out of work. The professional man, even if at ease about money, and with a little impatience of strenuousness, positively fears a life of idleness, and asks himself with increasing vehemence how ever, if life is spared him, he is to get enjoyably through his day. He is afraid of being bored to death, and he fears being bored with an acuteness which our grandfathers or even our fathers certainly never felt, or they would never have made their extraordinary arrange- ments for being permanently dull. Everything tends, there- fore, towards Sir Andrew Clark's resolution ; and the only thing to ask is whether it does or does not also tend towards the increase of human happiness and enlightenment.
We are by no means sure. The suffering of the young must be taken into consideration, for it is certain that under the new system they do suffer. Their chances of early success in life are materially reduced. There are fewer vacancies for them to fill up ; their chances of decent incomes are diminished; and their age of marriage is made later, without the desire for that condition of life being modified at all. They have to wait longer for all things, and waiting, besides being unpleasant in itself and to all men, involves risks of change, change even in their own capacities, which are some- times very serious. Moreover, as the old fill all places, and apparently fill them well, the world gets into the habit of trust- ing only the old, and regards the young as rather presumptuous for aspiring to do anything considerable. Most great military exploits have been performed by the young ; but there is not a country now where the sensible would not shiver if they heard that an officer of twenty-seven had been appointed to command an army. No one in England now would endure a Premier of Pitt's years ; nor would it be considered quite "safe" to send a Viceroy to India who was not at least five, years older than Lord Dalhousie, who was thirty-six when he took up the reins with a grasp which was felt in six weeks to be at least adequately strong. At fifty, a man is still young in polities ; and though life is a little swifter in the professions, no one rises to the top till maturity has well set in. All patronage rests with the old; and except in literature, which is still independent of the considera- tion of years, the old either disbelieve in the judgment of the young, or think, if they recognise it, that it indicates a certain deficiency in other and more attractive qualities. The young do not quite prosper as they should, and that is a set-off against the happiness of any generation, even if it is not one cause of the revolt against all that has been. which marks the hour, and which, if it extends much deeper, will provide for one generation, at least, years of acute misery. When the young despise arithmetic because it is in the way of their theories, something in the nature of an over- turn, or, as it is England, of a violent bolt of the State carriage, is pretty sure to happen. If we were to consider the young alone, we should say that the new disposition to stick on to work was perhaps a little selfish and, certainly as far as the future of the world is concerned, ill-judged, the habit of subordination being, except for the immature, worse training than independent responsibility. We say nothing of the immobility of the old as impeding progress, for to say the truth, we have no firm belief in it. It used to be true, we sup- pose, in a sense ; but in our time the greatest risk ever under- taken in polities was borne by a King of seventy-three, and the wildest revolution ever suggested in British polities was devised by a statesman of seventy-six. We may let that consideration wait ; but that the old are more in the way of the young than. they were, is as undeniable as the fact that thereby the happiness of a large section of each generation is grievously impaired.
On the other hand, the old have a good deal to say for themselves. To begin with, they have rights, and if they like to work on in their own proper places, we do not know that the community has a right to bid them go. if they do the work badly, that is another matter, and one which involves conscience, sticking on to work when conscious of unfitness being a grave, though little recognised, moral offence ; but as long as they do it well, their right to continue doing it would seem unassailable. Labour is a property in, say, physicians, as well as in coal-hewers. Nor is the quick recurrence of generations for the general benefit of mankind. They lose too mach experience. If men could fully profit by the experience of their predecessors, that would not happen ; but, as a matter of feat, they only profit a little, and that rather in the direc- tion of accumulating facts than of accumulating wisdom. A youngster will remember that his father always distrusted a particular firm, but will nevertheless make precisely the Um- ders which his father made and warned him against making. Long generations, by which we mean long periods of mature activity, must increase the wisdom of the world, if only because the young live by the side of the old for so much longer a space of time. This is especially useful just now, for the world of white men—which the presumptuous race of Japhet now declares to be the whole world—tends distinctly and visibly to rash experiment, and any circumstance which holds it strongly within the old lines, and compels it to reflect, must be beneficial. Mature men jump the precipice very often ; but they are not, taking them as an entire body, so likely to do it as the young, They are too comfortable to begin with. We fancy, therefore, that the conclusion must be, though it seems a lame one, that Sir Andrew Clark's deci- sion, though it does not tend to the happiness of mankind, does tend to their wisdom and enlightenment, and therefore, one would conceive, to their ultimate prosperity.
There is one curious moral problem connected with this subject which we often hear mentioned in private, but have never seen discussed in public. Suppose a man knows to a moral certainty that in sticking to his work he is killing himself, or, as man cannot foresee, is greatly impairing his chance of living, is he then justified in going on P Is not that a kind of suicide P We should say, Decidedly not, any more than it is a kind of suicide for an officer who might retire to go into a battle. There is no particular moral duty obeyed in merely keeping alive; and no one is bound to shirk duty, or even avoid work, merely for that reason. The work must be done by somebody ; it is So-and-So's place in the scheme of things to do it; and if through doing it death comes a little sooner, let it come. The sentry who stood to be overwhelmed by the ashes from Vesuvius did not commit suicide ; and though few men's duty is as peremptory, still, if a man judges that for this or that good reason, duty, even duty to himself, urges continuance in work, he may rightfully continue in it. The judgment in each individual case must be a careful one, and must, of course, be free from the wish for early death; but once deliberately formed, it is, we feel assured, full justification for continued toil. Sir Andrew Clark was advising, and therefore presumably benefiting, patients up to the hour of his seizure, and as he could not know when it would arrive, or whether it would arrive at all, was clearly within the limits of lawful liberty. We may refine upon that question of preserving health till we at last live only to keep alive, which is a peculiarly base existence.
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