Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 May 1894 — VANISHING WEALTH. [ARTICLE]

VANISHING WEALTH.

The improvidence of mankind, and the almost universal determination to at once realize and enjoy to the utmost limit all and every possibility of the flitting hour, is largely responsible for the vast majority of the woes of mankind to-day. Individual thrift and National financial methods cannot overcome the evils brought about by the wasteful customs and wicked prodigality of the past in dealing with the bounteous stores that nature bestowed upon >ur favored land. Forest and stream md lake and plain, and all the coves and inlets that adorn like glittering jewels all our endless shores, have from history’s dawn teemed with a wealth of life that needed but a prulont hand to yet endure and bless

the favored sons of men whom fate . .. had kindly placed within their charmed domain—whose only need was to grasp the stores so lavishly bestowed. Within the memory of men yet young the woods a»d streams-of our own great State afforded a generous livelihood to all who cared to use the gifts that nature gave,' yet to-day the cry goes up that even the wilds of the Kankakee no longer afford satisfactory “sport,” while from the famous fishing grounds of Connecticut where baked shad and Puritan religion are joint traditions and a memory of the nation’s birth, and from the far-ofl deeps of the mighty Columbia, where salmon surged toward the shores in myriads of fins that boundless avarice never dreamed could be exhausted by the most reckless methods—comes the word that even they have at last begun to succumt to the war of extermination that for a generation has been waged upon them.' Greed for ready gold, and lax enforcement of every law that has been passed to preserve for Our own citizens and their posterity a faint vestige and reminder of the storied wealth, that was their rightful heritage, that has been ruthlessly squandered, tell the tale of,a hope that has vanished, and only serve tc emphasize the hackneyed truth: “Take this maxim to your heart Take, oh hold it last; The mill will nover grind With the water that has passed. ’’