Jasper County Democrat, Volume 2, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1900 — ON FRIENDSHIP. [ARTICLE]

ON FRIENDSHIP.

Friends Are an Essential Part of a A Man's Resources. The ancients used to esteem a man’s friends as an essential part of his resources. They considered one without friends as poor, no matter how great his wealth in land or gold or slaves. Indeed, according to their idea, in the eyes of a noble-minded man one of the chief advantages of abundant possessions was the opportunity they afforded him of binding still more closely the ties of friendship. Homer’s “Iliad” is regarded by many critics as the greatest poem in existence. Its ruling note is the glorification of friendship, not of a man for a woman, but of a man for a man. What moves Achilles from his stern purpose and makes him forget the affront of Agamemnon is the overmastering desire to avenge his friend, Patroclus. Most of us moderns put too low an estimate on the worth of friendship as distinct from love. We have too few and too slender ties with those of our own sex. We do not cultivate friends, who shall be something more to us than chance acquaintances with whom the tie is the accident of neighborhood or a temporary community of interest. There come times in every man’s life when he realizes that a friend is the greatest of possesses, not because of what he can get out of him in the way of direct assistance, but because he needs the refreshment and guiding of wholesome human fellowship.— Boston Watchman.