Jasper County Democrat, Volume 5, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 June 1902 — BETTER STICK TO THE FARM. [ARTICLE]

BETTER STICK TO THE FARM.

Advice to Country Boys by One Who Knows City Conditions. It is said that the annual increase of Chicago’s population is from (10,000 lo 70,000, and among the newcomers every year are young men from the country who are victims of the notion that opportunity awaits them in the cities alone, says an editorial writer in the Chicago Record-Herald. Under this delusion they condemn themselves very probably to the disappointments of an overcrowded labor market. If they get work it is at a small wage or salary, they m«st live in cheap boarding houses, pass from them to cheap tenements if they have the courage to marry, find more and more that their position is. one of anxious dependence, and that the imaginary charms of city life disappear to leave nothing but the depressing reality of buildings jammed together to the exclusion of light and air, of an all-pervading noise and dirt, of a routine which gives little but a bare subsistence in the present and holds out no promise for the future. In the vast majority of cases such roust be the result, and while country life may have some serious drawbacks it is plain that these young men make a capital mistnke when they come to consider the question of opportunity through an ignornnt contempt of their familiar surroundings. ,If instead of indulging in dreams of fortune building in the city they were to master thoroughly all the work of a farm, cultivate an Interest In it, add a new intelligence to it, take over the lands of their fathers, or acquire others by purchase, put into this life all the ambition of their dreams, they would do better iu the end than 90 per cent of the city people, have a grouter enjoyment out of living, aqd attaiu to nn enviable independence.