Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 February 1920 — LIFE AT ITS BEST [ARTICLE]

LIFE AT ITS BEST

Advantages of Dwelling in Coun* try Town. City Man Knows Nothing of the Sweet Contentment That Ie the Lot of the Resident of Rural Places. .Observing the inconveniences and sometimes discomforts of city life, some of the brethren of the country press are taking a shot at the city dweller and emphasizing the fortunate position of the citizen who contrives to spend his life in some quiet town of the country, says a writer in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The country gentleman never cares whether the street cars run or not; he is not concerned with the electric light plant or the water supply, having his reliable kerosene lamps and a good well in working order for emergency use. He is not afraid that 400,000 of his townsmen will run out of coal at once and freeze to death, because the old grove on the east forty is capable Of furnishing his fuel should his supply of five cords of sawed and split wood that he has in his woodshed become depleted. He lives away from the mass, and his small wants are not pushed and crowded by the small wants of hundreds of thousands of othdr people. He feels that if there is anything that he really needs that he does not possess, he can go out and procure it any morning without much trouble, and he is generally quite right about it. " Charles M. Horton, of Hadley, N. Y., cites the cases of the city and the country, citizens in a recent issue of Collier’s Weekly. Writes Mr. Horton: The man who started the back-to-the-farm movement had something! The man who shouted “Back to nature,” said something; The advice was directed at city dwellers, of course, because folks who were living out of the cities already did not need it. He takes up the case of the $25 a week married man, who hardly exists in the city, and shows what he is accomplishing in town: A clerk in here gets $25 a week, owns his own' home and a boat on the lake and a jitney, goes hunting in the north woods in the fall, fishes evenings and days off without nuifiber, picks berries, kills his own beef in the fall, raises his own pigs, has a piano and a library and a silver service and linen, modern pictures on the walls, good rugs on the floors, mission furniture around the rooms, twin beds, a dog, two cats, a bear rus. ceilings, pktin wall paper, electric fixtures —everything, in short, that the city dweller has, or wants, but can’t have —and he is a clerk’in a grocery store at $25 a week. And he had these things when he was getting $18 —six months ago, before he got a raise—had more, in fact, because he owned a trotting horse that could go some; this animal has since died. The writer himself was beguiled from the country to the city under the cmmon belief that the city is the only place for the man of ambition who would go far. He had brains, in a measure; he had money/ in a measure, and then he tossed the whole thing up in the air and made back for the country, where he now exists in contentment. And when one sees city folk bedeviled and harassed and bepinched by every human want, living from hand to mouth, and worrying lest some necessity of existence be cut off by some whim of man or vagary of fate, one is inclined to give the argument of the country citizen large value and credence.