in the
squalid sections of our large cities. General Garfield's infancy and
youth had none of this destitution, none of these pitiful features
appealing to the tender heart, and to the open hand of charity. He was a
poor boy in the same sense in which Henry Clay was a poor boy; in which
Andrew Jackson was a poor boy; in which Daniel Webster was a poor boy;
in the sense in which a large majority of the eminent men of America in
all generations have been poor boys. Before a great multitude, in a
public speech, Mr. Webster bore this testimony:

"'It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin, but my elder
brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin raised amid the
snow-drifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early that when the smoke
rose first from its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills there
was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the
settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to
it an annual visit. I carry my children to it to teach them the
hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them. I love
to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early
affections, and the touching narratives and incidents which mingle with
all I know of this primitive family abode.'

"With the requisite change of scene the same words would aptly portray
the early days of Garfield. The poverty of the frontier, where all are
engaged in a common struggle, and where a common sympathy and hearty
co-operation lighten the burdens of each, is a very different poverty,
different in kind, different in influence and effect, from that
conscious and humiliating indigence which is every day forced to
contrast itself with neighboring wealth on which it feels a sense of
grinding dependence. The poverty of the frontier is indeed no poverty.
It is but the beginning of wealth, and has the boundless possibilities
of the future always opening before it. No man ever grew up in the
agricultural regions of the West, where a house-raising, or even a
corn-husking, is matter of common interest and helpfulness, with any
other feeling than that of broad-minded, generous independence. This
honorable independence marked the youth of Garfield, as it marks the
youth of millions of the best blood and brain now training for the
future citizenship and future government of the Republic. Garfield was
born heir to land, to the title of free-holder, which has been the
patent and