696 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



and dealers say there is but little profit in their trade. The farmer complains- 

 that his productions do not pay interest on his investment and for his labor. 



The mechanic says his labor during the summer and fall months does not 

 supply him with funds to sustain his wife and children during the idle days- 

 of winter, and the day laborer often suffers for the necessaries of life when sum- 

 mer and fall work has past. If that be the condition of our population of to-day,, 

 what must it be a hundred years hence ? 



American citizenship of the nineteenth century is unlike the social condition 

 of any former populace known to history. In other periods that have gone, 

 there was an alliance demanded by the land-owner, and granted by the plebian, 

 who felt his inferiority because he was not an owner of land, and subject to the 

 will of him who was. 



A widely different state of things exists here ; in the hundred years past,. 

 American thought, American character, American freedom, all have been culti- 

 vated into an unity, and become an object which so many of the rising generation 

 are seeking to attain. 



It is this freedom, — this effort to rise, — this persistent and logical thought, 

 ©f the young and laboring classes that have given our government some of its 

 wisest and best men. Our great systems of internal improvements have been 

 built by the capital made by the energies of the country-raised boyhood, and 

 some of the finest works of civil engineering are from the same class, and inven- 

 tions that have revolutionized the commerce and civilization of the world have 

 grown out of the same class of mind. Nothing so loudly proclaims the value of 

 boyhood effort as the successes that have rewarded many citizens in every com- 

 munity. 



But these vast demands for skill, and energy, and capital are ceasing. The 

 railroads have been built ; the streams have been bridged, the saw-mills have 

 been constructed and worked up the forests into lumber ; the fiouring-mills are 

 more than able to grind up the wheat production. The towns and cities have 

 an over-supply of dealers in all branches of trade. The farmers are all supplied 

 with buildings, and that most profitable and useful class of works known as agri- 

 cultural machinery has supplied all previous necessities, and there is enough left 

 to furnish the future demand for five years. Where now, with all demands sup- 

 plied and enterprises comparatively finished, must the young men and women 

 look for such work as will supply the wants of life and give such vitalizing influ- 

 ences to the germs of true greatness, as will elevate them above the degrading 

 effects of idleness? 



This freedom of American thought has in so short a time, worked such 

 wonderful results and created such vast supplies, that it has to stop and ask 

 "What must I do next?" Cannot some man of broad, perceptive thoughts rise 

 and answer the enquiry, before the problem becomes entangled with other issues ? 



Independence, Mo., February 25, 1885. 



