No one can feel well or go efficiently about his duties with his nerves on a strain. Every muscle must be free and loose. Each organ must be at ease and liberty to proceed in the performance of its function. The physical life cannot move by fits and starts without harm to itself. We cannot go in jerks without soon feeling the harmful results of so doing. There is a still deeper reason than this for the harmful effect of discontent on the health. Unhappy emotions promptly set up processes which form poisons and pour them out into the system. These poisons have a paralyzing effect upon muscle and nerve. This accounts for the fact that indigestion or other organic inactivity will often follow a fit of violent anger or deep grief. The Japanese are said to cultivate the habit of forcing themselves to smile. They do this, it is said, for the general benefit it renders both to disposition and health. It is a fact that a relaxed and smiling countenance has a tendency to put the rest of the body at its ease. The conclusion is that every cheerful moment contributes to long life and physical well-being, and that it is not possible to give way to an uncontrolled torrent of unpleasant feelings or to the chilling hold of gloom without by so much shortening the days one has to live. Melancholy is anti-social. It would scarcely be too much to say that it is criminal. If it is a crime to trespass upon the rights or the happiness of others, then gloom is a crime, for the reason that it does increase the burden and detract from the happiness of every person who ever comes into its chilling and blighting presence. It does not dispose of the responsibility to say that other people need not be affected by our feelings. As a matter of fact, other people cannot help being affected by our feelings. Nothing is more contagious than feeling. The warm and genial spirit sheds light and joy wherever it goes—as a matter of course. The chilled and crabbed soul makes its presence a place of arctic coldness—and equally without effort. Where there is cheer, there we find spontaneity and freedom. Where there is gloom, there are weakness and constraint. It is a serious question whether anyone ought to be allowed so to add to the world’s burden. Having been near someone who was constitutionally unhappy has more than once unfitted someone else for his daily task. No one cares how long his day or how hard his work so long as he can keep a courageous spirit, but when he is robbed of that, he is shorn of practically all his power. Men are not looking for more troubles. They already have more than enough. They are looking for genial souls who know the value of a smile and can teach it to men. The world really owes a large debt to the men who have made it their business to coax a laugh occasionally to its weary and hardened face. The man who has made the way a little more sunny for some far stranger whose face he will never see in this world shall in no wise lose his reward.