Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 35, Number 121, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 October 1903 — INCENTIVE TO EFFORT. [ARTICLE]

INCENTIVE TO EFFORT.

The tenon Lincoln's Life Tenches te the Idle Bern. It is human nature to take it easy when we can, and with most people a biff bank account will paralyse effort and destroy ambition. Who can tell what would hgve been the effect on onr national history had Abraham Dincoin been born in luiury, surrounded with great libraries, free to the multiform advantages of schools; colleges and universities, the manifold opportunities for culture that wealth bestows? Who shall say whether the absence of all incentive to effort might not have smothered such a genius? What wealthy, city bred youth of to day, glutted with opportunities for acquiring knowledge, can feel that hunger for books, that thirst for knowledge that spurred Lincoln to scour the wilderness for many miles to borrow the coveted “Life of Washington” which he had heard that some one in the neighborhood owned? What young lawyer of our day goes to a law school or library with such a keen appetite, with such a yearning for legal knowledge, as this youth had when he actually walked forty-four miles to borrow Blackstone’s “Commentaries?” Where is the student in college oi university today who experiences that satisfaction, that sense of conquest, which thrilled Lincoln while lying on the floor of his log cabin working out arithmetical problems on a wooden shovel by the light of a wood fire or enthpsiastically devouring the contents of a borrowed book, as if his eyes would never rest on its pages again? On reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech and his second inaugural address foreign . readers exclaimed, “Whence got this man his style, seeing he knows nothing of literature?” Well might they exclaim, but their astonishment would have been still greater had. they known that these eloquent utterances that thrilled tli<? ..nation’s heart had fallen front the lips of one who in his youth had access to but four books—the Bible, “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Weems’ •'•Life of Washington” and Burns’ poems.—Success.