What My Critics will Say 45 



any more healthy, than the life in the Ameri- 

 can colonies one hundred years ago? So far as 

 material prosperity goes, it seems that there 

 was far less poverty then than now in the ne- 

 cessaries of life; the farmhouses were filled to 

 overflowing with good things to eat and drink. 

 There were few books, and if some inventors 

 and workers had not given up country life long 

 enough to invent power-presses we might not 

 have newspapers and books so cheap as they 

 are to-day. But I doubt if any one thinks of 

 colonial life in this country as less worth living 

 than our life of to-day. Certainly in New 

 York City there was not, in proportion to the 

 population, one quarter of the poverty, the 

 misery, the vice, that we know to-day. There 

 was not that fierce struggle for existence which 

 blights the lives of so many hundreds of thou- 

 sands of our fellow-creatures. 



If the world persisted in playing as I do, 

 although few people regard wood-cutting and 

 grubbing in a garden as play, should we not 

 have had any great inventions, should we not 

 have had any steam-engines, or the power- 

 press, or the telephone? This would imply 



