436 BUFFALO LAND. 



There is no reason why people should starve in the great 

 cities of this broad and heaven-favored land of ours. Busi- 

 ness men, so often besieged and worried with applications for 

 positions in their stores and counting-rooms, might with ad- 

 vantage tack up a copy of the Homestead Law by their desk, 

 and keep a further supply on hand for distribution. Every 

 few months some poet sings of the ill-paid seamstress in the 

 crowded town, or some hideous murder brings to light the 

 heroine of the garret-stitched shirt. Yet, meanwhile, at Den- 

 ver City, house-girls have been getting from six to ten dollars 

 per week, and thousands could find comfortable homes through- 

 out Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, with remunerative wages. 

 Abroad, men toil, and women work in the fields, and in one 

 year pay out from the scanty earnings which they wring from 

 a stingy soil more than enough to purchase one hundred and 

 sixty acres of good land in the great and growing West. 



SHOULD THEKE NOT BE COMPULSOKY EMIGEATION? 



Except in the case of the very decrepit, or totally disabled, 

 there can be no excuse for begging, in a country which offers 

 every pauper a quarter-section of as rich land as the sun shines 

 upon. I suppose the millennium will commence when laws 

 compel the cities to drive from them the idle and vicious, and 

 make them tillers of the soil in the wilds. Instead of brood- 

 ing in the dark alleys, and breeding vice to be flung out at 

 regular intervals upon the civilized thoroughfares, these ger- 

 minators of disease and crime would be dragged forth from 

 their purlieus and hiding-places, and disinfected in the pure 

 atmosphere of the large prairies and grand forests. Granting 

 that it might be a heavy burden upon their shoulders at the 



