Amador ledger., 1906-07-13

the great tide of population that has
been drifting from the country to the
cities. We must decentralize industry
and trade as well as population. The
patriotism that is latent in every
heart must find an outlet in every
country town and village in the work
of village Improvement, of creating an
environment for human life where
the highest utility and beauty will
surround the entire community, and
where local civic loyalty will prevail
that will anchor the people to their
own hearthstone and where they will
live content under their own vine and
fig tree.
This local pride and love of home
and the home town is one of the
strongest of human feelings when
once it is deeply planted. 1t should
be cultivated in every possible way.
Nothing should be left undone to
stimulate or cement it. Every member
of such community should cultivate
a spirit of comradeship and cooperate
to advance the general welfare of all.
The merchant, the small tradesman,
the country editor, the Church, should
all work together to that end.
Home industry should be encouraged
in every possible way. The whole
community should cooperate to pro-
tect and stimulate the trade Of the
town.
The home paper should be literally
patroniZed. There is no one thing
capable Of more far reaching and en-
during influence for good than the
country press. One of the most un-
fortunate of modern influences has
been the trend of commercial evolu-
ton that has borne so heavily on the
country editor by the development of
the metropolitan family monthly and
mail order papers, filed with tempt
alton for the rural people to stimulate
the Capitalization of wealth and trade
in the cities by supplying their ordin-
ary needs from far distant and prac-
tically unknown sources. This trend
toward the Capitalization of trade
and industry in the great cities walks
side by side with the Capitalization of
wealth and population as menace to
our national future. The danger it
threatens can only be obviated by
awakening the people at large to re-
alization of it.
The great central and controlling
thought that must rise above all
others as national ideal is the con-
viction that the real bulwarks of the
nation are the Homes of its Citizens
and that the first thought and highest
ambition of every young man should
be to establish a HOME, a self-sus-
tanning Home on the Land, where he
can be Independent and enjoy the real
happiness of a well spent life and not
make the mistake that brings dissap-
pointment and misery to so many, of
setting up the accumulation of a for
tune as the goal of his life's ambition!
1t is a lure which of necessity must
wreck thousands in order that a few
may succeed. The man who earns
enough to live comfortably without
luxury, as every intelligent and in
dustrious man can who has sufficient
practical education, and who does
his duty to himself, his family, his
friends, his country and to humanity,
is the man who really succeeds in life
and who gets the greatest happiness
and satisfaction out of it.
To create a human character of the
highest type with everything that
implies, is the most admirable of all
human achievements and that every
man and woman must and can do for
themselves.
"a time like this demands strong men,
Great hearts, true faith and ready hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill,
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy,
Men who possess opinion and a will,
Men who have honor, men who will not
lie,
Men who can stand before a demagogue,
And damn his treacherous batteries with
out winking;
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the
fog,