working a valuable machine, would keep it going at its highest
speed all the time. He takes care of it, keeps it clean, renews
defective parts, oils it; and then he expects it to run for so
many hours, and to run well,--to do its work thoroughly. But with
all his keeping it in order he does not make it work night and day
for weeks or months. Such folly is never heard of in an engineer;
but with us human beings, who own and manage a far more wonderful
machine than any steam engine, we hear of it often, and always,
_always_ the tale winds up with the inevitable catastrophe.
The business man develops paresis, the clergyman loses his voice
or his eyes, the nurse contracts some disease that incapacitates
her for work, in every case mother Nature makes the careless or
ignorant owner of the wonderful machine pay the penalty of the
misuse. It does not matter to Nature what the reason is for our
breaking the great laws; we can kill ourselves with philanthropic
work just as surely as with over indulgence. One trouble is, that
it does not always _kill._ A paralytic may live for years, so
does a man with paresis. When the wonderful God-given machine
works badly, or stops entirely, we look on, and sometimes wonder
why it is that those who are so helpful, such fine examples of
courage, of skill, of virtue, so hardly to be spared, are the ones
to be taken away. Do _we_ wonder, we who are nurses? Do we
not know what did it? Ah! yes--we know, we know, that such and
such a nurse was tired out when she went to still another case--
and when we heard she herself was ill we were not slow to say,
"Foolish girl! Did she suppose she was made of wrought iron and
sole leather?" But will _we_ take heed, and not do likewise,
or will we wonder, with the unthinking ones, why it is that the
good, useful people are always taken away? Do not deceive
yourselves; they are not "taken away," they take themselves away,