274 Missouri State Horticultural Society. 



is embarrassed to furnish terms, the treasury to supply funds, and 

 those who do labor are made to groan under the strain of taxation. 

 Great God, how pitiful ! How sickening ! To see strong men 

 with pallid faces and trembling hands begging for the privilege of . 

 service. That, too, in a land where millions of rich acres may yet 

 be had of the railroad comj^anies almost for the asking. 



To what are we come by our "' educate, educate, or we must 

 parish by our own prosperity ?'" To this universal seeking to evade 

 the work of the fields and orchards, and to much negligent, st^^pid, 

 unskillful agriculture-to "living from dirty hand to dirty mouth." 



Let us reform. Let us teach our sons and daughters to scorn 

 dependence ; to prefer laboring hard for self to the gay trappings 

 and liveries, uniforms of slaves and menials. And that still the 

 grandest place for man or woman is where the old patriarchs, kings 

 and awfnl fathers of mankind stood — in their own tents, on their 

 own soil. With all our artifices we are making a nation where a 

 few hundred are millionaires ; several hundreds of thousands are 

 their dependents or menials ; other thousands are supernaturally 

 skilled in art, tricks and ti-ades, while millions are crowding the 

 dirty streets of cities, or leading aimless lives in the melancholy 

 tax-ridden, mortgaged country. Legislation 'and monopoly com- 

 bine to make the rural regions still more a waste, dreary and 

 monotonous ; every art is plied to draw the yeoman's few pence 

 and all his senses to the town. What has been, what is, may yet 

 be here. The census proves it. Every year since 1880 this ten- 

 dency has increased most woefully. And yet who does not see that 

 all this sickening strife of town-life is unnatural, unwholesome and 

 contemptible ? What man of an independent soul does not feel 

 how vastly superior is the position of him who can boldly exclaim 

 with Eobbie Burns : 



" For me, so low I need na bow. 

 For. Lord be thanked, I can plow." 



