is pained at the very thought that he must make a final decision, and is always reconsidering, weighing and balancing, recalling his letters, tearing open the seals to see whether he has really meant what he has written, whether it were wise to send the letter, after all, or whether he has left out something important. But the man of decision is the man who succeeds, and decision is the child of strong vitality, of a well nourished brain.
Is it not astonishing that, despite these facts, in our efforts to economize, we often lose tenfold by cutting off our nutrition, in going without lunches, or bolting inferior food at a cheap quick-lunch counter? By trying to save a few cents a day in this way we cut off ten dollars’ worth of vitality. We may reduce our business-getting ability by dulling the ambition, so that we may lose a hundred dollars’ worth of business.
When we skimp on food we do so at the cost of power and vitality. If the body is not completely nourished, the blood will be impoverished, or made impure; and vitiated blood means poor quality of thinking, than which nothing can be more extravagant.
The great thing is to keep oneself up to the highest point of efficiency at any cost or pains. Anything which reduces the fire and force in the brain, which lessens the ambition or the energy, weakens will-power, courage, self-confidence, inclination to work, initiative, and power of decision. In fact, the whole mental apparatus, the efficiency of the whole of life’s machinery, is affected. Such economies are criminal.
One might as well try to economize on the board of a horse about to enter a contest of speed, and expect him to win, as to economize on his own food and expect to remain in tiptop condition. Speed and staying power are what he is after for the horse, and these must come mostly from the food, the drink, and the general care.
Every ambitious man is in a perpetual race for supremacy of some kind. Can he afford to economize on that which produces brain force, that which produces health? Can he afford to economize on energy-producing material?
Many well-meaning people fail in life because they are not good to themselves. They do not have enough to eat, or they do not have food of the requisite quality to keep their brains and bodies up to the highest point of efficiency.
We are not here simply to exist, but to achieve the greatest thing possible to us, and we cannot afford to deny ourselves the best of everything that can contribute to our efficiency. Multitudes are doing mediocre work just because they do not have the highest quality of brain food. They do not take proper care of themselves.
I know fairly well-to-do people who are too stingy to buy fruit, except when it is very cheap, although it is necessary to health; for it is not only a blood purifier, but it is also a blood-maker. Nothing else is better for the system than good ripe fruit; and, no matter how scarce or high in price every one should have some at least every day. Many people, without knowing it, are pinching their very life sources by foolish economies,—eating poor, tough meats, dried-up or half-matured or wilted vegetables, cheap, adulterated teas, coffees, spices, etc.
Now, every one ought to start out in life with a determination to be good to himself, just to himself. He ought to resolve not to cheat his very source of power by feeding his body with inferior products. Pinching on the very source of one’s supply of mental and physical power is fatal frugality. There is a great difference between the results of first-class and second-class brain power, and it is the quality of the food that often makes the difference.
Failure is frequently due to mental deterioration, to weakening of courage, of self-confidence and of mental grasp, so that men make business slips which they would not have made formerly. They have deteriorated physically, and they do not realize that their minds go up and down with their physical condition like the mercury in a thermometer.
The unfortunate thing about mental deterioration which follows the violation of physical laws is that it is so subtle as to be almost imperceptible, and people who have been successful are often suddenly confronted with failure because of the loss of their mental grip, the crippling of their courage and initiative.
Napoleon’s downfall was largely due to physical deterioration. In youth he had given much thought to diet, as a means of making the most of himself, but the subject was then but vaguely understood. Even as some savages think that the spirit of a conquered foe passes over into them and strengthens them, so he looked upon food. The stronger the animal eaten, the stronger the eater should become. Hence he who would become king of all the Giant-killer Jacks should eat elephants, the largest and strongest of land animals. But elephants were scarce and costly in France, and his purse was not that of a multimillionaire.
An ox was the nearest substitute he could think of obtainable at a moderate price, and oxen were slaughtered for the army every day. But even an ox could not be considered a full substitute, so he must exercise care and eat the strongest part of him and thus approximate his ideal standard as closely as possible. This strongest of all parts must clearly be the brain, for that rules all the rest of the animal. So he had saved and cooked for him, and daily ate, the brain of an ox.
Now it so happens that iron, lime, and sulphur are indispensable in the formation of red blood corpuscles, and lime and sulphur are not found in brain substance. It also happens that sulphur is one of the best medicines for the itch, and probably, through its presence in the blood in proper quantities, one of the best preventives of that disease, at least in a severe form. Possibly because of his deficiency in sulphur, incidental to his peculiar diet, he caught or developed at Toulon the itch in an aggravated form, which annoyed him greatly for years. His physicians tried in vain to cure him, and repeatedly urged him to allow them to “drive it in.”
To this he would not consent, for a long time, saying that the itch is but an outward manifestation of an effort of Nature to get rid of something bad inside. For his part he was glad that his system was so resistant and persistent in trying to throw off the bad thing, whatever it was, and he wanted that cured, not its mere itching manifestation or symptom. One might, he admitted, put an extinguisher on a volcano, but that would only cause it to break out in some other way or place.
But at the zenith of his power he consented, for he considered it very undignified for the great conqueror of conquerors and emperor of emperors to squirm and scratch on even the greatest occasions, and scratch he had to, sometimes, no matter what was going on. He was never quite the same man after he “conquered his itch by driving it in.”
He also suffered from epilepsy, due, perhaps, in no small degree, to his diet, for it is caused by insufficiency of red blood corpuscles and consequent disturbances in the circulation. When the itch, perhaps a kind of outlet for his real trouble, had gone, his epileptic attacks increased in frequency and severity and sometimes temporarily incapacitated him when under greatest pressure and needing the strongest and most perfect circulation,—even before or during some of his most important battles in later life.
Further, he had a very restless brain, and this was stimulated to undue activity both positively by the excess of phosphatic material in his dietary, and negatively by lack of nerve-quieting oxygen in his blood from deficiency of lime and sulphur in his food. As Faraday discovered, oxygen is slightly magnetic and hence is attracted by the iron in the red blood corpuscles. When the red corpuscles are deficient in quantity, not enough oxygen is taken up by this magnetic attraction. So his brain, like an engine with an imperfect safety valve, drove the wheels of his life at a pace too furious to last long in perfect condition. Again, from lack of enough red corpuscles, he could not absorb enough oxygen to burn up or oxidize the fat produced by his food, and he became corpulent. Worst of all, not improbably the cancer of the stomach from which he died at St. Helena was occasioned, if not caused, by lack of sulphur in his food.
Close observers have repeatedly noted how decayed limbs of trees or even fence posts that have stood in the ground a long time, after the rains have soaked out their sulphates and warm damp weather has developed their phosphorescence,
