FIFTY CENTS ON HIS NEIGHBOR’S DOLLAR

a full return, and has he walked into his neighbor’s parlor (shabby for lack of the fifty per cent) and congratulated him on the return of the holidays?  A spade is a spade with him.  A thief is a thief.  He does not like thieves.  He says so.  Neither does his city cousin like thieves.  His city cousin is very careful not to say so.  He does not like monopolies, he says so.  Neither does his city cousin like monopolies.  His city cousin would “turn off” any clerk who said so very loudly, let alone saying it himself.  He does not like corruption and hypocrisy.  On this point his city cousin has

POSITIVELY NO OPINION,

as “it really would ruin his business.”  Thus we see the farmer—­free, ingenuous, independent.  Thus we see the city merchant—­smooth, prudent, sycophantic.  Thank God for Agriculture!  And now

CANNOT WE INSPIRE YOUNG MEN

with a little truer idea of life?  Cannot we teach them that money in itself is not what they want above all things?  How little wealth the really wise find necessary!  On the farm is health, independence, high standing—­all within the reach of any young man.  He certainly sacrifices one or two of these objects when he enters a city.  He can get money but he will lose his health.  If he get true independence he will be

ONE OUT OF TEN THOUSAND,

all the rest of whom are slaves.  With the new combinations forming in the business of the world, new experiences are constant.  The man employing three hundred fortunate workers to-day, may be himself searching for work next year.  The man getting $5,000 a year to-day may next week be trying to find labor at a dollar a day, and may absolutely fail.  The financial panic has no such thing in store for the farmer.  He will live on, just as his brook runs on, and when the sleek magnates in the hotel-parlor decree that he must lose his farm, as they need it for a “colony,” he will rise up and smite them, and thereafter the sleek magnate will be an affair of the past.  Young man, if you have not an absolute genius for something else, stay on the farm.  Read books which will make you desire to be a pure man, just for the noble name it will give you.  If you can get as great a desire to be a good man as you have to be a purse-proud man, you will be on the right track; for you will see that honesty is easier in the perfumed fields than it is in the polluted air of a city business-house.  Read over the biographies, and see how certainly all our great men got their greatness in the open air of the country.  Take a big city, for instance.  Has it not surprised you to see how few great men New York or Chicago have furnished to the nation?  The city levels men.  It drags them down.  Their individualities are put into a dredge-box, and the flour of mediocrity is scattered on all alike.