Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 290, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 December 1912 — SINGS PRAISES OF POVERTY [ARTICLE]

SINGS PRAISES OF POVERTY

Writer Point* Out Why In Many Way* It Should Be Preferred to Affluence. Any man may brutally pay his way anywhere, but It is quite another thing to be accepted by your human kind not as a paid lodger, but as a friend. Alwiys, It seem* to me, I have wanted to submit myself, and Indeed submit fti* stranger, to that test. Moreover,

how can any man look" for true adventure In life If he always knows to a certainty where his next meal is coming from? In a world so completely dominated by goods, by things, by possessions, and smothered by security, what fine adventure ia left to a man of spirit save the adventure of poverty? I do not mean by this the adventure of involuntary poverty, for I maintain that involuntary poverty, like in-

voluntary riches, is a credit to no man. It is only as we dominate life that we really live. What I mean here, if 1 may so express it, Is an adventure in achieved poverty. In the lives of such true men as Francis of Assisi and Tolstoy that which draws the world to them in secret sympathy is not that they lived lives of poverty, but rather, having riches at their hands, or for the very asking, that they chose poverty as the better waj of life. —David Grayson in the Amerl can Magazine.