42 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 



poverty then than now in the necessaries of 

 life ; the farm-houses 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 news- 

 papers 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 quar- 

 ter of the poverty, the misery, the vice that we 

 know to-day. There was not that fierce strug- 

 gle for existence which blights the lives of so 

 many hundreds of thousands 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 that the 

 man who devoted a large part of his life to 

 such sports as I do, wholly unfits himself for 

 other kinds of work which I deny. My own 

 work which brings me money happens to be 



