NORTH AROOSTOOK SOCIETY. 175 



„ jETaving' a home and familj^, we need, we want the means of 

 subsistence, of living, to render that home pleasant and^iappy. A 

 home without victuals, without comfortable clothes, without a 

 competence — which will enable us to live as our neighbors do, will 

 never be the home that we desire. 



The old adage, that, "when poverty comes in at the door, love 

 jumps out of the window," is one of the maxims of wisdom. The 

 idea of verdant boys, and love-sick girls, that they can live, no 

 matter where, and subsist on, no matter what, and be siqyremehj 

 happy if they can only be in each others company, is an illusion that 

 time will cure, sooner than bank paper ever matured with the 

 insolvent debtor. They will find that love alone is poor stuff on 

 which to live, althoug'h it is excellent as a desert after a dinner of 

 roast beef and vegetables. 



The individual ownership of property is an appointment of 

 Heaven. And every man, to enjoy life, 'must have a competence 

 which he can call his own. He must have property to which he has 

 a legal right, which he can hold as against the world, and without 

 it, he cannot have that independence of character, which is essen- 

 tial to true manliness. It is not necessary that he have immense 

 wealth — indeed great wealth is as detrimental to happiness as 

 abject poverty ; but it is he who holds fast the golden mean, and 

 lives contentedly between the little and the great, who, like Agur, 

 is desirous of neither poverty nor riches, who has enough to supply 

 all his natural wants, and a competence for old age, that best 

 fulfills the condition of happiness, derived from money and what 

 it procures. 



We need the means of intellectual improvement. We want in- 

 tellectual food. The mind needs food just as much as the body, 

 and will pine away and die, just as surely as the body if it does 

 not have it. It is continually craving and desiring to know some- 

 thing which it does not now know. This want must be supplied. 

 It will obtain its intellectual repast somehow, whether we design 

 to supply it or not. Intellectual, like physical hunger, will break 

 over a stone wall. Just like the animal appetite, if it cannot obtain 

 wholesome food, it will have unwholesome, and so, if we do not 

 supply our sons and daughters with good intellectual food, they 

 consume with avidity, the nauseous trash which comes like the I'ush 

 of many waters from a corrupt pi'ess ; the base literature which 

 comes up from the purlieus of Paris, New York and other large 

 cities, enervating, corx'upting and debasing thousands of souls 



