BRAZILIAN HOURS.
THIS Emperor of Brazil is going to be a bore. People say he is quite an admirable person, an entirely new type of Majesty, a great geographer, a man interested in all manner of knowledge, in-
quisitive about all progress, able to cross-question the experts of science in half a dozen tongues, and to benefit by their replies; a suc- cessful sovereign, too, and capable on occasion of considerable acts of philanthropy ; but for all that, he is going to be a bore. The British moralist has seized on him, and is flinging him flail fashion at everybody's head. Ilia Majesty lives, when he is at home, in a city situated in 22° 54' south latitude, and consequently almost within the tropics. As it is hot down there, steaming, burning hot, he, like a Calcutta merchant, or a Louisianian planter, or a Nea- politan cultivator, finds it convenient to rise at five, and get two or three hours of work over before the sun can exert its full power, to rest in the middle of the day, and to work again in the pleasant cool of the evening, till nightfall. lie regards the sun, which is the Englishman's friend, as his enemy, or rather as a troublesome acquaintance to be carefully bowed out of his work- ing cabinet. A habit of that kind, maintained for a lifetime, is not easily given up, and as the Emperor has endless work to do in England and a thorough inclination to do it, and as everybody is willing to oblige an Emperor, even at the risk of a yawn, he succeeds in keeping it up in Eng- land, and trots about everywhere to see everything at six o'clock in the morning. That would be quite unobjectionable, but that the Briton of the didactic kind will make it an occasion for insincere moral lectures, and tell us all, sometimes in long articles, sometimes in smart little paragraphs, that because an Emperor who lives where the palm tree grows gets up at five, we ought in our climate and under our civilization to imitate "this illustrious example," and people who read the lectures feel uneasily that they are wanting to their moral ideal, aud though they make no change in their own habits, take advantage of the opportunity to drive their neighbours quite frantic with good advice.
We say "good advice" from habit, because we were taught as children to believe it good, and because everybody who acts on it is like a monk with a hair shirt, so uubearably conceited of his own virtue, but we should like very much to hear some sound reasons for calling it good. Why ahould early rising be a virtue demanding the homage of a universal and most tiresome hypocrisy ? Idleness is, of course, a vice, and as we believe, one of the most injurious, though not the most debasing of the vices ; but idleness and the distribution of time have no necessary connection with each other. Night watchmen work as hard as day watchmen. Supposing it to be clear that a man ought to give a fixed proportion of his life to labour—a pro- position we should, with certain qualifications, be disinclined to deny,—why is that proportion to be regulated by the sun? What in, the name of common-sense, has he to do with the matter in a climate like ours? Many men, notably English barristers in high practice and English Members of Parliament, get the best out of themselves by working full power for the seven chilliest months of the year and lazing away the sunniest time. Some of the most industrious men in the world work only at night—the present Governor of Jamaica is one of them—and it may be taken as certain that the higher the rank of the worker in a temperate climate—the more completely, that is, he has been civilized by culture—the less disposed is he to work in the early morning. No profession anywhere in the West begins labour at six o'clock. There is no special industry in working at one hour more than another, and on the didactic theory no special
virtue, such as self-denial. Moralists might make a point by preaching early rising as a judicious method of moral training, a daily self-suppression or sacrifice of the carnal man ; but they always tell us, with the coolest defiance alike of fact and probability, that early work is the pleasantest, though scarcely any human being, once master of himself, over attempts to obtain that easily won pleaeure. If early work be not unpleasant, why does nearly every- body avoid it, or why do we carefully arrange our social system so as to obviate any necessity for it ? Oh, say the moralists, but then a man should do his best, and early work is better work ; but where is the proof of that ? Of course, if men will drink hard, or take more alcohol than the system can absorb, or eat to repletion at nine o'clock, or work themselves to death, early work is best, because it is sober and unfatigued work ; but on fitly reasonable conditions it is worst, because it is work done either before the body is recruited with food, or before the food has had the necessary time to digest. The Lanceg says early rising is healthy, but the only evidence it produces is that London life, with its late hours, hot rooms, and incessant fatigues, is very unhealthy for young women, which is true, but no proof that, granted the same deficioucy of rest, the morning sun would revive them. As a matter of fact, Orientals who get up early are not nearly as healthy as Westerns who get up late, and do not live nearly as long. Where is the proof that the agricultural classes in England, who universally rise early because they cannot have artificial light, are healthier than the gentlemen who almost uni- versally rise late ? They are stronger, no doubt, more especially the women ; but that is the result of regular work, not of early rising. A milkmaid gets just as ill as a rector's daughter. A man who gets up early and takes a walk, when otherwise he would have sat all day, may benefit by the exercise; but the walk would do him *just as much good, except in July or August, at any other time of the day. There is possibly one bodily gain in the practice, a slight relief to the eyes, which grow weary with so much work under artificial light ; but we are not quite sure even of that, believing that though short eight is less common among agricul- tural labourers than among members of Parliament, bleared
eyes and eye diseases are at least as frequent. In the native land of ophthalmia, the fellahs get up at four, and English actors are not at all remarkable for weak eyes. There are quite as many hale octogenarians among the cultivated men of Western cities who get up at nine or later as among ploughmen, and a good many more with their faculties unimpaired. Nor, as Dickens once put it, is it clear that all sweeps are healthy, rich, or specially gifted with intellectual power.
The truth is that late rising in civilized countries is not the result either of idleness or fashion, or contempt for hygienic laws, but of a habit based partly upon convenience, and partly upon the social system of division of labour. It is very inconvenient for any society which is in any way inter-dependent to vary its time of rising with the sun, and it therefore selects a rough mean time at 'which for the greater part of the year there will be a decent measure of daylight. In England that thus is not five or any thing like five, but between eight and nine ; and accordingly the majority of people who can do as they like select that time for rising, and so enable themselves to act with something like concert. They can all go to business at once in- stead of wasting hours in waiting for each other, and all finish at once, instead of burdening the whole class of assistants, clerks, &c., with different and variable hours. Moreover, they can all go comfortably to work, that is can economize their strength to the utmost, acute discomfort unnecessarily incurred involving loss of mental power. In England, for eight months in the year, early hours involve discomfort great enough to be positively injurious, —if not to health, at all events to mental serenity. Chill is not healthy, and our early hours in this climate are chilly and damp, unmitigated by fire, and unsoothed by food and coffee, none of
these alleviations being procurable except at the cost of dimi- nished sleep for the whole caste of servants, who, as it is, need somewhat more time for rest than their masters, and obtain somewhat less. This might be corrected, no doubt, by every- body retiring much earlier to bed ; but the only effect of that change would be to shorten the time for rest and recreation, which is much too short already. In the fierce competition of civilized life men would work twenty-four hours if they could, and would assuredly work through the whole of the additional daylight secured by their change of habit. Under the existing system, the professional classes can, if they like, work steadily eight hours a day under the circumstances beat cal- culated to economize effort, and yet retain eight hours for food, society, and reading, and eight hours for sleep. The working-classes with their sure instinct for their own interests - are trying to secure just those very conditions, and will in the end. secure them. Of course they have to be paid for, but in spite of Franklin's grand nonsense about the cost of candles, the price in
a Western climate and in cities which use gas is not very heavy, . probably not equal to the value of one hour a week of any artisan's - work, a cost which would be more than repaid by increased freshness, strength, and willingness for toil.
If, thou, there is no argument for early rising in a climate like ours how do we account for the prevalence of the belief in its virtues, a prevalence so widely spread that his accidental habit of getting up betimes has made the Emperor of Brazil quite popular among a people who certainly will not imitate him'? Well, the men who made our proverbs were most of them country folk, .., and as country labourers must be early to save light, country . masters invented our particular apophthegm about early rising for the benefit of the class which of all others has least health— vide the returns of any parish dispensary—wealth, or wisdom.. Lying proverbs intended to console men under discomfort incurred for the benefit of other people are common enough iu all countries, and that is one of them. Then Solomon approved early rising, and the British public, though it studies and reverences his sayings, having an instinctive respect for his bourgeois and slightly cruel genius—we wonder how many British children have been tortured because Solomon whipped Rehoboanx into tyranny ?—never will remember that the great Sheik dwelt in a climate where work can be best accomplished before the sun's rays are vertical, in a land where the shadow of a great rock is not . • chilling, but refreshing. And then finally, the discipline of the nursery requires the superstition. Children fatten on sleep, and as they will not sleep in the daylight they must be sent to bed early, and as they hate going to bed early, a theory has to be in- vented for their consolation which influences them long after they . have discovered that man in our time does not live in a state of nature ; that getting up with the sun and going to bed with the - falling night involves a huge waste of life ; that man's brain was • given hina to supplement nature, not to obey her slavishly ; and that, on the whole, in a world such as they live in, the way to be , -- "healthy and wealthy and wise," is to get up at eight, work through daylight, study, eat, and play till midnight, and sleep through the small, uncomfortable, chilly, nerve-consuming hours supposed to begin the day. That may not be the distribution of time which produces milkmaids, though we should like to fight that out ; but milkmaids do not invent telegraphs, apply spectral analysis, or govern the world.
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