Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 February 1894 — TOPICS OF THESE TIMES. [ARTICLE]

TOPICS OF THESE TIMES.

FRIENDSHIP. ( In a recent published interview exiSenator Farwell, after recounting |his experiences of fifty years of life in Chicago, tracing his rise from a country youth who tramped the streets of the far western village for four months before finding employmentdown through a successful business and political career which has culminated in the fortune of a mill- _ ionaire and the great honor of having represented the important State of Illinois in the most dignified legislative body in the world —an honor that is sought for ablest aqd wealthiest men of our day as Beijs||t! almost the acme of human preferment —closed his remarks by saving: “That’s the story! There’s nothing in it!" Being asked if there was cot honor and hundreds of friends in it, he replied bitterly: “There'snothing in glory and friends — friends! I can count my friends on my hands and they are members of my own family. There is not such a thing as friendship in this world. Friendship is all theory. What you call friends are butterflies. They hover around you in the sunshine, and when the shadows come they disappear. If I want to make an enemy all I have to do is to help a man who is in deep trouble. He will hate me in the end because I have placed him under obligation. I believe after my fifty years’ experience lam what you would call a pessimist." This may all be true in Chicago, and we are not surprised at such sentiments when emanating from a typical Chicago business man, but we protest against the sweeping character of the charge that there is no such thing in the world as friendship. There may not be in Chicago, but there is in Indiana. It is entirely too rare a virtue, yet it does exist in numberless instances. Friendship cannot be measured by a money standard, and he who looks at it from that standpoint is evidently incapable of pure apd disinterested friendship. No man who has been bereaved and received the totally disinterested services and kindly care of his neighbors in his hour of trial can say honestly that there is no such thing as friendship. If a man has so lived among his neighbors for fifty years as not to have experienced this kind of friendship—when during the long and weary days and nights of watching and distress the great hearts of the people go out to the sufferer without hope of any earthly reward or compensation of any name or nature —then indeed he may comfort his soul with the bitter thought that there is “no such thing as friendship in all the • world." “Hope not to find a friend but what has found a friend in thee; all like the purchase, few the price will pay; and this makes friends such miracles below.” Again, a man must have lived a supremely selfish life, who. after fifty ’years can truly j say that he has not one single friend outside of his own family. Real i friends are indeed hard to hold, and i doubly so when a man proposes to I view them as stepping stones to a financial success, or when he measures his own efforts towards making friends by the probable amount of money that he can help them to make. Real friendship has quite a different basis, and his is a hard heart who has not found in the course of a long tife a few kindred spirits whose , thoughts and emotions and hopes and desires can gently blend with bis own, smoothing out the wrinkles sf care from an overtaxed brain and aching brow as naught on earth besides can do. Oh, there is, there is such a thing as friendship—almost aiiy place outside of Chicago. “Friends my soul with joy remembers, How like quivering flames they start. When I fan the living embers On the hearthstone of my heart. 1 '