Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1882 — The City and the Country. [ARTICLE]

The City and the Country.

The Rev. Robert Collyer made the remark on one occasion that during his twenty years’ residence in Chicago he had not known of a single man who had come prominently to the front in any pursuit who was bom and bred in a large city. All the leading men in every calling—judges, lawyers, clergymen, editors, merchants and so on, had been reared in the country, away from the follies, the vices and the enervating influences that are known to exist in all large towns. The New York Times takes up the same subject and says : ~ Fashion reduces all young men and women to the same dull and uninteresting level. New York is now an old city. It has produced generations of men. How few of them nave ever made their mark, here or elsewhere ! It cannot be said that they go into other parts of the country and there develop the higher forms of manhood. They are never heard of except in the aggregated, concrete form of “our fellow-citizens.” How much of a man is due to qualities born in him, and how much to his early environment, no philosopher has been able to tell us; but it is impossible to conceive of a sagacious intellect like that of Lincoln, or a glorious mind like Webster’s, emerging from the false glitter and noisy commotion of the city. We think of Washington, the patrician sage, pacing among the stately oaks of old Virginia, of Jefferson in his couutryseat, and of John Adams tilling his farm in Massachusetts. These men, it is true, flourished in a time when there were no big cities in the United States. But later on we see Lincoln, Grant and Garfield , reaching the topmost round of fame’s ladder from the obscurity of country homes. Not one American President from first to last was born in a city.

The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston have made what they call a centurv box, in which are put thirty essays by members on past and present events in Boston. The box is to be kept sealed until 1980, when the essays may be publicly read. A man is wiser for bis learning, and the sooner he learns that the only proper way to cure a Cough or Cold is to use Dr, gifil’s gousft tyrup, the better he is off.

An exchange has these truthful words to boys: “ The boy who spends an hour of each evening lounging idly on the street corners is wasting, in the course of the year, 365 prescious hours, which, if applied to study, would familiarise him with the rudiments of almost any of the familiar sciences. If, in addition to spending an hour each evening, he wastes ten cents for a cigar, which is nanally the case, this worse than wasted money would pay for ten of the leading periodicals of the country. The gratification afforded by the lounge on the corner and the cigar is not only temporary but positively hurtful. You cannot indulge in them without hurting yourselves. You acquire idle and wasteful habits which cling to you with each succeeding year.”