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importance. “One day,” said
    Mrs. Rinehart, “this woman had been obliged to face
    something, her age perhaps. The lonely years were
    stretching ahead and there was little left for her to anticipate.

    “She took to her bed; and for ten years her old mother
    traveled to the third floor and back, carrying trays, nursing
    her. Then one day the old mother, weary with service,
    lay down and died. For some weeks, the invalid
    languished; then she got up, put on her clothing, and
    resumed living again.”

    Some authorities declare that people may actually go
    insane in order to find, in the dreamland of insanity, the
    feeling of importance that has been denied them in the
    harsh world of reality. There are more patients suffering
    from mental diseases in the United States than from all
    other diseases combined.

    What is the cause of insanity?

    Nobody can answer such a sweeping question, but we
    know that certain diseases, such as syphilis, break down
    and destroy the brain cells and result in insanity. In fact,
    about one-half of all mental diseases can be attributed to
    such physical causes as brain lesions, alcohol, toxins and
    injuries. But the other half - and this is the appalling
    part of the story - the other half of the people who go
    insane apparently have nothing organically wrong with
    their brain cells. In post-mortem examinations, when
    their brain tissues are studied under the highest-powered
    microscopes, these tissues are found to be apparently
    just as healthy as yours and mine.

    Why do these people go insane?

    I put that question to the head physician of one of our
    most important psychiatric hospitals. This doctor, who
    has received the highest honors and the most coveted
    awards for his knowledge of this subject, told me frankly
    that he didn’t know why people went insane. Nobody
    knows for sure But he did say that many people who go
    insane find in insanity a feeling of importance that they
    were unable to achieve in the world of reality. Then he
    told me this story:

    "I have a patient right now whose marriage proved to
    be a tragedy. She wanted love, sexual gratification, children
    and social prestige, but life blasted all her hopes.
    Her husband didn’t love her. He refused even to eat
    with her and forced her to serve his meals in his room
    upstairs. She had no children, no social standing. She
    went insane; and, in her imagination, she divorced her
    husband and resumed her maiden name. She now believes
    she has married into English aristocracy, and she
    insists on being called Lady Smith.

    “And as for children, she imagines now that she has
    had a new child every night. Each time I call on her she
    says: ‘Doctor, I had a baby last night.’ "

    Life once wrecked all her dream ships on the sharp
    rocks of reality; but in the sunny, fantasy isles of insanity,
    all her barkentines race into port with canvas billowing
    and winds singing through the masts.

    " Tragic? Oh, I don’t know. Her physician said to me:
    If I could stretch out my hand and restore her sanity, I
    wouldn’t do it. She’s much happier as she is."

    If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance
    that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what
    miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest
    appreciation this side of insanity.

    One of the first people in American business to be
    paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there
    was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a
    week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab, He
    had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the
    first president of the newly formed United States Steel
    Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight
    years old. (Schwab later left U.S. Steel to take over the
    then-troubled Bethlehem Steel Company, and he rebuilt
    it into one of the most profitable companies in America.)

    Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a
    year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to
    Charles Schwab? Why?