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In a letter to his daughter Martha, written in March,1787, Jefferson writes: "Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes with so silent, yet baneful a tooth, as indolence. "Body and mind both unemployed, our being becomes a burthen, and every object about us loathsome, even the dearest. "Idleness begets ennui, ennui the hypochondria, and that a diseased body.
Thomas Hughes, the member of parliament and the author, known all the world over, hearing that a new turf enterprise was being started in this country, wrote a letter, in which he said: "Heaven help you, then; for of all the cankers of our old civilization there is nothing in this country approaching in unblushing meanness, in rascality holding its head high, to this belauded institution of the British turf."
The critic does his utmost to blight genius in its infancy; that which rises in spite of him he will not see; and then he complains of the decline of literature. In like manner, these cankers of society complain of human nature and society, when they have wilfully debarred themselves from all the good they contain, and done their utmost to blight their own happiness and that of all around them.
You cannot extinguish it without destroying one of the noblest developments of civilization; but you cannot have civilization without multiplying the temptations of human society, and hence must be guarded from those destructive cankers which, as in old Rome, eat out the virtues on which the strength of man is based.
Sprinkle the plants with this preparation, every morning and evening, by dipping in a brush and shedding it over them; and in a few days all the cankers will disappear. Or sow with hemp all the borders where cabbages are planted, so as to enclose them, and not one of these vermin will approach. When gooseberry or currant bushes are attacked, a very simple expedient will suffice.
It is powerful for good when divinely used. Give it plenty of air, and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up, and it cankers and breeds worms. Like all the best gifts of God, like the air and the water, it must have motion and change and shakings asunder; like the earth itself, like the heart and mind of man, it must be broken and turned, not heaped together and neglected.
Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject, suspense is the one that most gnaws, and cankers into, the frame. And this suspense suspense of this nature, for more than eight whole months, had Madeline to endure! About the end of the second month the effect upon her health grew visible.
The hired man skins the tree with the harrow; fire runs through the dry grass; hard winters shatter the vitality, and parts of the tree die; borers enter; rabbits and mice gnaw the bark in winter; loads of fruit and burdens of ice crush the tree; wind storms play mischief; bad pruning leaves long stubs, and rot develops; cankers produce dead ragged wounds; fire-blight destroys the tissue; a poorly formed tree with bad crotches splits easily; grafts fail to take, and long dead ends are left; the tree is injured by pickers; vandals wreak their havoc.
It has been seen how calmly, to all outward appearance, the baffled and detected man bore the knowledge of his ruin. Ruin, because nothing less was involved in the failure of his plans. He had long been embarrassed in money affairs, and for months before his business as a Tombs lawyer had been falling away under that worst of all cankers neglect.
'Some of you, said her majesty, 'must kill cankers in the musk-rose buds, and some wage war with the bats for their leathern wings, to make my small elves coats; and some of you keep watch that the clamorous owl, that nightly hoots, come not near me: but first sing me to sleep. Then they began to sing this song: 'You spotted snakes with double tongue, Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen Newts and blind-worms do no wrong Come not near our Fairy Queen.
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