
: 
THE SONS OF 
aspect advantages and virtues of its 
own. 
This conception of poverty is in 
essence a recapitulation of the early 
history of the human race and is the 
normal condition of the pioneer. It 
may mean, of course, rather hard ex- 
ternal conditions, as of climate and soil 
and an absence of easily available 
resources, but it does not imply the 
dependence of one class upon another. 
Rather does it proclaim interdepend- 
ence of the whole community upon 
one another as friends and helpers in 
the exigencies of a common existence. 
Such a condition does not necessarily 
carry with it any intellectual, moral or 
esthetic inferiority or degradation. It 
is consistent with the highest character 
and culture. Emerson says of Tho- 
reau, “He knew how to be poor without 
the slightest hint of squalor or inele- 
gance.” 
In this consideration of it one might 
say that poverty is the reaction of a 
healthy nature upon extreme simplicity 
of outward conditions, upon life re- 
duced to its lowest terms; it is averse 
to multiplying the aims and means of 
living and does not like to burden the 
present with too much care for the 
future. It regards enough as better 
than a feast and is easily cloyed with 
luxuries. It is privation taken in 
tonic doses. 
The life of any one New England 
farming community of three genera- 
tions ago did not radically differ from 
any other. In the one with whose 
history and tradition the writer is most 
familiar, the people were either artisans 
or small farmers dependent for a living 
on the fruits of their daily toil. They 
were all of untainted native blood, most 
of them had skill in their various handi- 
crafts and nearly all were virtuous, 
patriotic citizens. 
They were all poor; that is, they 
lived upon the product of the constant 
labor of every able member of every 
family. They had, and cared to have, 
little or nothing ahead. This fact dis- 
tinctly fixes their status as one of 
fe SETTLERS 509 
poverty. They did not, however, suffer 
from lack of the necessaries of life. 
They had food enough, comfortable 
houses to live in, sufficient and decent 
clothing for all common _ occasions. 
An ungraded or district school was 
maintained for four or five months in 
the year to which all children were 
punctually sent and if kept with less 
technical skill than schools are now, 
and having a much narrower range of 
studies, it was on the whole as salutary 
and effective as the schools of to-day. 
But by far the largest and best part of 
the education which the boy of that day 
received came not from books. It 
came, firstly, from the unhindered de- 
velopment of such germs of thought 
and faculty as he had inherited from 
a vigorous parentage; secondly, from 
external nature and the everyday com- 
munion with the wild life of fields and 
woods and waters, the large phenomena 
and vicissitudes of the weather and 
seasons; and thirdly, from the drama 
of human life which went on before 
his eyes in a theater so small that every 
seat was, as it were, near the stage. 
Moreover, in a condition of poverty, 
the vital concerns of family and neigh- 
borhood are in a perfectly natural and 
inevitable way made obvious and im- 
pressive. Even the child so participates 
in or comes so near to the great facts 
of life and destiny—to birth, love, grief, 
sickness, death—that all the results of 
human experience and a rare knowl- 
edge of human nature are his at first 
hand to be absorbed, digested and 
utilized in the natural and unceremoni- 
ous intercourse of a primitive society. 
He enters early into the life itself, sees 
lumber cut from the stump, hauled to 
the mill and dressed, houses planned 
and built, wells dug and pumps set, 
bridges and dams and mills constructed, 
hides tanned and curried, horses and 
oxen shod, boots and shoes and clocks 
and barrels made. He learns to handle 
an ax, a spade, a hoe and a scythe, to 
hold a plow and harness and drive 
horses and oxen; he learns much of 
the wild life about him; he assists in 
