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I shall claim first no one really does his full duty as a citizen 

 without making some sacrifice, and feeling something of sentiment 

 about his work. In a republic, from the very nature of things, 

 every great public benefit must be made up of a thousand little 

 bits of self-denial or personal loss on the part of individuals. It 

 follows as a natural law that if we would get any great abuse or 

 wrong out of public life, a mighty penalty must be paid for it, and 

 you and I and the rest of us must pay our little share. This was 

 so of slavery, and it will be so of other evils which we are fighting 

 to remove from public life. We must buy them, pay for them 

 out of our own comfort or prejudice before we can kill them. 

 The sentiment I have mentioned may be expressed in various ways. 

 We may show it in packing a superior box of apples for the real 

 joy of doing it, in making a good farm, in pride in a home, in a 

 dozen ways which come into the ordinary life ; in doing things for 

 which we expect only a sentimental or a spiritual reward. For the 

 truth is that no man can do his full duty as a citizen for money 

 value alone, or for the material things which he may hope to get 

 out of life. Duty calls a man or a woman up to higher ground 

 than that, doing things as I have said for the real joy of helping 

 and improving the conditions of life. 



You may say that this is hard doctrine, but can you think of 

 any real duty which does not involve some sort of a struggle or 

 moral discipline? If that be so of small duties, how can we hope 

 to escape the larger struggle in the greatest of all patriotic duties, 

 that of keeping our republic so that the common man may have 

 a fair chance ? And that is what it amounts to. We owe no patri- 

 otic duty to the rich and great, or to those who have obtained more 

 than their share. They owe a duty to us. Our duty lies rather 

 to the plain common man who is denied the rights which should 

 belong to him under a republic. I am not old enough to know it 

 or prove it, but older men have told me that the ten years from 

 '50 to '60 was the golden age of farming in America. There was 

 little aid from science at that time, and less from invention. We 

 never dreamed that we should be called upon to spray or ferti- 

 lize, or do dozens of things which now seem necessity. It cannot 

 be said that in those days the well-to-do farmer could be as com- 

 fortable upon his farm as now. There were no such markets as 

 now, and nothing to compare with our transportation or national 

 wealth ; yet for independence of character, love of home, and real 

 glory in our business, that period was, I believe, ahead of this one. 

 I think that on the whole our citizenship was of a higher character. 

 Why? Because at that time our farmers were inspired through 

 their whole daily life by a great moral question regarding labor, 

 and the God-given right of man to labor and to a home of his own. 

 That was what the slavery question meant to most of our farmers. 

 Men could not be free in hand and heart and soul, so long as 

 slave labor or degraded labor was permitted in the same country. 

 These old farmers before the war saw the point quicker than we 



