Littell's Living Age/Volume 125/Issue 1615/The Mental Effect of Pecuniary Pressure

From The Spectator.

THE MENTAL EFFECT OF PECUNIARY PRESSURE.

There are very few men, or at least very few experienced men, who, if granted by Providence or a fairy the fulfilment of some one wish, would not, after deliberate consideration, embody that wish in the words "perennial and perfect health." Ill health is such an evil, some forms of ill health comprise in themselves so much of the totality of misery, that very few men who understand the science of life, even if they were capable of deep mental, spiritual, or affectionate feeling, would not ask for health as if it were the sum of blessings. And yet we doubt, studying the record of suicides, whether sickness makes anything like the demand on human fortitude that is made by pecaniary distress, whether half as many people kill themselves in consequence of it, whether it produces anything like the same amount of mental misery. That poor man Hunt, who last week was committed for trial on the charge of murdering his wife and children, or, as he said, for sending them to heaven, was not so much injured by the ill success of his business as he would have been by blindness or a broken back, or any of the worse forms of chronic neuralgia; and yet we all feel that had he been smitten by any of these calamities, he would have submitted quietly where, under pecuniary distress, he took, or tried to take, his fate into his own hand. Except jealousy, there is scarcely any cause of suicide, as revealed in the occasional glimpses the world catches of concealed truths, so potent as pecuniary trouble; and even jealousy seems scarcely to cause misery of an equally acute kind. People commit murder, suicide, forgery, and all the crimes of greed every day under the compulsion of a form of suffering which least excuses their crimes to their own minds — your murderer for greed, even when confessing, always tries to invent some higher immediate motive — and which ought, one would think, to admit most of the palliative of hope. Jealousy may be incurable, for it may be well founded. Grief may be irremovable, for it may be founded in that most bitter, unending, unalterable sense of want, which a death can produce, and which bites like one of the strange diseases, seldom seen in Europe, in which permanent and savage hunger is one of the first symptoms. Humiliation may be irremovable, for it 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 society involves all miseries hunger, overwork, humiliation, is scarcely sufficient, for human beings able to judge would choose them all in preference to cancer. We believe the causes for this overweening horror of poverty, which certainly exists, and with many classes in this country furnishes an overpowering motive in life, are two, both of them easy to be explained. The first cause undoubtedly is that men fear most those future troubles which they most clearly realize, and that they realize very few. The majority of mankind, fortunately for themselves, have very little imagination, and that imagination is most easily stirred upon its hopeful side. Every man must die, and how very few think often of that greatest of events! It is the hardest thing in the world to induce men ever to expect pain, and the man who knows perfectly well that a burst of temper will bring on angina pectoris or that a glass of sherry will renew the torture of gout, still indulges his anger or his taste without any serious fear. The best argument against transportation as a punishment is that criminals have such a difficulty in realizing its meaning — soldiers, for instance, in India, often try to be transported — and it is the same want of imagination which, even in countries where the population has a horror of suffering, makes universal conscription possible. People do, however, realize poverty, realize it thoroughly and painfully, and dread it, therefore, as they never dread very much worse evils. They know what it is to have no money, and the prospect of having none affects them as keenly as if they were already destitute. The man, therefore, who sees destitution coming on, say, for twelve months, is therefore as far as the strain on him is concerned, a man who for twelve months has been destitute, and has suffered all, and more than all, that destitution implies. It is not true, perhaps, to say that nothing is so painful as imagination pictures it, for many pains, such as tic, are probably worse, but nothing is so painful as imagination pictures it in a man whose imagination is thoroughly informed. He collects together involuntarily all the terrors of the situation, which in fact would be dispersed, and expects the workhouse and starvation, as it were, together. He cannot or at least does not realize that the suffering of having to eat "skilly" and the suffering of being without a meal cannot happen simultaneously to the same individual. He would fear cancer for his daughter quite as much as poverty, but he knows what poverty would be, and does not, though he thinks he does, fully realize the disease. The second cause we believe to be the sense of injustice which enters into this peculiar form of suffering. Men submit to evils visibly dealt out to them by Heaven or fate with a resignation they are often unable to display under evils in which human will is an operating cause. We take it, the man who commits suicide from pecuniary pressure will always be found to be a man who has worked, and who has raged secretly or openly at the apparent injustice involved in work bringing no return. Nothing overturns the balance of the mind so quickly as a long-continued sense of injustice, and nothing, especially in the army and merchant navy, is so frequent a cause of suicide. The man who is gliding into poverty from no fault of his own, or from a fault he does not perceive, is apt, unless a man of singularly well-balanced judgment, to feel himself oppressed, and oppressed by power which is resistless, without being in any sense divine; he is compelled to fight, as it were, without weapons, and as it is not open to him in this world to decline the struggle, he leaves this world behind. Pharaoh's order that bricks should be made without straw excites a sort of horror in the minds of millions who do not know why straw was needed; and a little tradesman without capital, who toils like a slave, yet all in vain, constantly feels as the Jews did, as if he were fighting against a power which could not be mollified either by labour or obedience, but returns for submission only a demand for the impossible, and for labour only the sarcasm, "You are idle." No other form of misery, except perhaps, religious persecution, produces quite this impression, or, when it is continuous, so destroys the spring in most men's minds, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast," — except the bankrupt's.