I see young men, my townsmen, chose misfortune it is to
have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tool; for
these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had
been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they
might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to
labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat
their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of
dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they
are born? They have got to live a men live a men's life, pushing all these
things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a
poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered
under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a
barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and
woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary
inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and
cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man
is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate,
commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an
old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt
and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they
will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said
that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over
their heads behind them:-
Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.
Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,-
From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
Approwing that our bodies of a stony nature are.