it. The hypochondriacal imagines he has all manner of diseases and loves to talk about them to anyone who has the patience to listen to his tale of woe.

The neurasthenics are the very opposite of this. They are usually people of refined susceptibilities, sensitive about themselves and their feelings. They have, therefore, to bear their burden alone. They see the clouds gathering on their mental horizon and their sky getting darker and darker. The future becomes laden with foreboding, and all around there is the presentiment of a storm that is about to break. Often they keep their feelings to themselves, until at last these become of such intensity that they can no longer be hidden. Such persons often welcome a definite illness, if only because it gives them something unmistakable to speak about, affording them the opportunity of calling in the medical aid of which—quite wrongly, be it observed—they had previously been ashamed to avail themselves.

We are sometimes told that headache, giddiness, pains in the region of the spine, weak digestion and a host of similar complaints are preliminary signs of oncoming breakdown. Yet, whilst they often accompany the latter condition, they are also significant of many other ailments, which have nothing to do with it. Sciatica may be the result of a chill, spinal pains of an influenza cold, whilst headache may be due to biliousness, faulty eyesight or a variety of other conditions. The fact that we suffer from any one of them does not imply that we are threatened with a breakdown. For all that, it is not well to neglect these complaints, for it is certain that if we have any tendency to nervous trouble they will hasten it on.

To suggest, however, that such symptoms are preliminary to a nervous collapse would be to inspire, in the minds of many people, a sense of terror which would precipitate the very disaster we are anxious to avoid.

One thing, however, it is necessary to emphasise. If any symptom of this sort—and the remark applies especially to headaches—is found consistently to come on during the hours of work, alleviating after the work is over for the day, it should be taken as a danger signal. For when anyone’s occupation brings on a headache, the complaint is much more likely to be due to some weakness of the nervous system than to any fault in digestion or eyesight. And the same applies to many other symptoms also.

The phenomena I am about to describe are those suggestive of nervous weakness, and any man or woman who recognises themselves in the picture I shall attempt to draw had better take warning. They need not alarm themselves unduly, but they will be well advised to pull up short.

There is one point which must always be kept in mind. It does not follow that because a person is easily tired, or is irritable or depressed or dreads any ordeal awaiting him, or is nervous in any direction, that he or she is drifting towards a breakdown. It is when people who have previously been free from such weaknesses find that they are acquiring them that they must face the fact their nervous systems are on the down grade. Each individual must be taken as his or her own standard. What is natural for some would be unnatural for others. A person is ill when he falls below his own level of health, either of body or mind. The various signs of neurasthenia or breakdown depend, not on comparing a man with anyone else, but in measuring him by his former self.

One of the most constant symptoms is a gradual decline in strength, either of body or mind, without any organic disease to account for it. If a man whose heart, lungs and kidneys have been proved sound begins to suffer from fatigue after an amount of exercise such as he would not previously have noticed, everything points to the fact of its being the result of some impairment in his nervous system. More particularly so if the tiredness is of an unpleasant nature. There is a delightful form of fatigue and there is a painful one. There is nothing more enjoyable than the gentle aching which a healthy man feels as he stretches out his limbs in a comfortable chair after a good day’s walking, shooting, golf or whatever else it may have been. He feels, in mind and body alike, a delicious sense of half-sleepy lassitude, which affords to a higher degree than anything else a sense of repose and well-being.

That is very different from the weariness that dogs a man’s footsteps wherever he goes, or is even with him during his sleeping hours, so that he rises in the morning more tired than when he lay down. When that happens something in his organisation has gone wrong.

Equally significant is the langour that attacks people when they are following their daily avocations. Of course, it is natural that as people grow older they should find themselves less capable of exertion than they were in their younger days. Most persons over forty years of age have to take things somewhat more quietly than before. They are not so well able to run, and perhaps have to walk more deliberately, but that is very different from feeling fatigued when there has been no justification for it. Yet even that is not a matter of such gravity as when a man who has taken a keen interest in his daily work, of whatever sort it may be, discovers that it is becoming more and more of an effort. Or it may be a woman, who finds her household duties, which had hitherto been a pleasure to her, becoming a bugbear. And when anyone, either man or woman, begins to look forward habitually with dread to the work of the following day, their health is in sore need of attention.

Yet in most cases all that they do is to reproach themselves for their indolence and apply themselves to their duties still more assiduously, with the usual result that they worry themselves and everybody else. And the harder they try the worse things get, until at last the work in which they had taken such a pride becomes a nightmare to them. They begin to shrink from the thought of it, yet it forces itself continually upon their notice. Perhaps even the evenings, which should bring a sense of refreshing and repose, are spoiled by fretting over the events of the day that is gone and worrying as to the work of the morrow; the housewife in trepidation as to her duties in the home, the workman to his job, the commercial man to his business, the parson to his next appearance in the pulpit.

The result is that in many cases the work suffers.

Worry and anxiety are the common lot of mankind, at any rate in this age of stress and competition. Yet it is not the common cares of life which have a detrimental effect on the human system, but this useless, exaggerated vexation of spirit. When a man has lost the power of leaving his worries behind him, it is time that he began to take heed, for sooner or later they will affect his work. If he allows himself to drift, wasting his energies by futile struggling against his own disabilities, his mental faculties will begin to show signs of wear and tear.

It may be that his memory will play him tricks, words and facts failing him at the critical moments. There is no surer sign of neurasthenia than when a man who has always been a ready speaker, begins to hesitate for words in which to express himself. The worst symptom of all is when people noted for their firm, decisive characters find themselves unable to make up their minds, either on some subject of general interest or on points connected with their own pursuits.

An even worse phase of fatigue is that which intrudes upon the hours of recreation. It is bad enough for people to become unduly