for many earnest listeners. Yet here and there may be
men and women, ignorantly sinning against the laws by which they should
live or should guide the lives of others, who will perhaps be willing to
heed what one unbiased thinker has to say in regard to the dangers of
the way they are treading with so little knowledge as to where it is
leading.

The man who lives an out-door life--who sleeps with the stars visible
above him--who wins his bodily subsistence at first hand from the earth
and waters--is a being who defies rain and sun, has a strange sense of
elastic strength, may drink if he likes, and may smoke all day long, and
feel none the worse for it. Some such return to the earth for the means
of life is what gives vigor and developing power to the colonist of an
older race cast on a land like ours. A few generations of men living in
such fashion store up a capital of vitality which accounts largely for
the prodigal activity displayed by their descendants, and made possible
only by the sturdy contest with Nature which their ancestors have waged.
That such a life is still led by multitudes of our countrymen is what
alone serves to keep up our pristine force and energy. Are we not merely
using the interest on these accumulations of power, but also wastefully
spending the capital? From a few we have grown to millions, and already
in many ways the people of the Atlantic coast present the peculiarities
of an old nation. Have we lived too fast? The settlers here, as
elsewhere, had ample room, and lived sturdily by their own hands, little
troubled for the most part with those intense competitions which make it
hard to live nowadays and embitter the daily bread of life. Neither had
they the thousand intricate problems to solve which perplex those who
struggle to-day in our teeming city hives. Above all, educational wants
were limited in kind and in degree, and the physical man and woman were
what the growing state most needed.

How much and what kind of good came of the gradual change in all these
matters we well enough know. That in one and another way the cruel
competition for the dollar, the new and exacting habits of business, the
racing speed which the telegraph and railway have introduced into
commercial life, the new value which great fortunes have come to possess
as means towards social advancement, and the overeducation and
overstraining of our young people, have brought about some great and
growing evils, is what