Show the old settler NTY my dear san Jua ners this item of a job a living a source of revenue men are talking 1 abut abut it writing about it fighting about it and the strikes and threats and hostile combinations growing out of it bid fair to upset our whole economic polity the millions coming home fram the war are looking for something on which to live and there ara other millions here at home who are resolved to have higher wages shorter hours and more comforts or to disrupt the government and ia everything for which we have been fighting it is not a pleasant outlook and the way in which it is involved leads the ordinary man to think it is a problem beyond the comprehension of the common mind that i may inay be for as elbert hubbard bays ays man moves in a mysterious ioas i way his blunders to perform human haman ills spring not only from naive stupidity but from an exaggerated ag Ig notion of self importance which makes unreasonable and impossible demands eight hundred years ego g the prairie land surrounding B a anding n d and extending indefinitely in all directions sustained tens of thousands of people their ruined dwellings are still in evidence on hundreds of hills and the th a traces f their agrical agriculture agri cul are lare L are still to be seen after all this lapse of time but they had no big roads through the country no methods of transportation por tation other than their strong backs no extensive system of trade or commerce no complicated g government vern ment with skeins and skeins of glittering red tape tap e they imported little or nothing from beyond their narrow borders and their exports amounted to just that much yet they lived and became a numerous people till a twenty year drouth made them move away it is a long story into whose thrilling phases we canna take a look at this time but the important lesson it has for this present I 1 age of seething unrest in modern america is worth conAdera consideration tion these people all had jobs no strikes no labor problems no dangerous interdependence and t brou trou rou ble breeding entanglements entangle ments wherein their whale system of living could be distracted by the greed and lusts of a few the basic principle by which they preserved their L economic co safety was embodied in their fundamental belief and practice that all men are to dig the their ir own living from the soil and eat their bread by the sweat of their own face every man had his little plot of ground and he cultivated it with the crude implements he made with his own hands considering what those implements were for we have seen them and taking into inta account the little those primitive people knew about handling the soil and con continued on page ten the old settler nag i 1 si dering further that even under those thosa and other great handi handicaps they lived for many generations what could we do with our asplen did implements and our advanced understanding of the soil if we would profit by their example of j peace and industry inthis in this great wide country with its fertile soil its water and cli i mate its limitless opportunities opportunity es j how perfectly idiotic for the peo 1 pie of the present to be in turmoil I 1 and strife about a way of living we could have our ro s our commerce our factories ur exchanges and divisions of labor and go on building arid abild be free and happy if men would just recognize the soil as the source of life and settle resolutely down to caring for themselves in the emergency and practice reasonable self denial fr the sake of peace till the essential transition has time to got get into swing whatever might be said against this way out of the difficulty it should be clear to everybody that it would be much better than the de destruction s truc tion and bloodshed to wh which ich we are getting definitely headed ALBERT R LYMAN |