Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 115, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 May 1915 — REAL TRUTH IN THESE LINES [ARTICLE]

REAL TRUTH IN THESE LINES

One Might Criticize Them as Poetry, But They Contain a Lesson Worth Heeding.

A Quincy traveling salesman, who keeps open a most observant eye in his travels around the country, noticing the influences which affect a city’s prosperity, sends to the Herald what he terms a “good piece of poetry.” The poetry may be open to question, but the sentiment is one which every Quincyan should have deeply impressed upon his mind, and hence it is worth repeating. It is as follows:

"If you want to live in the kind of a town like the kind of a town you like, you needn’t slip your clothes in a grip and start on a long, long hike. You’ll only find what you left behind, for there’s nothing that’s really new. It’s a knock at yourself, when you knock your town. It isn’t the town —it’s you. Real towns are not made by men afraid lest somebody else gets ahead. When everyone works and nobody shirks, you can raise a town from the dead. And if .jyhlle you make your personal stake, your neighbors can make one, too, your town will be what you want to see. It isn’t the town —it’s you." The Quincy man further says in his letter: “It will be a good thing to put in the paper for Quincy people who go to Chicago and St. Louis to buy their goods.” For these very persons it is here reprinted. —Quincy Herald.