[The enormous expense of living]

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The enormous expense of living at this season of the year is calculated to sorely distress the sensitive feelings of housewives, fathers of families, and people of limited income and large incumbrances generally. The prices of beef, mutton, and many other staple articles of household consumption, are high enough to enjoin the most rigid economy on those persons in humble circumstances who wish to live with comfort, yet without running into debt.

To atone for this gloomy prospect, we have on every hand the promise of an abundant harvest, and a coming season of plenty; but there is room to fear that the demand for our cereal productions is increasing in a much larger ratio than the amount produced. It is true that fresh lands in the fertile West are constantly being added to the area under cultivation, and that new faculties of transporting produce to the market are continually being developed; but through immigration from Europe and exportation of food to other countries, consumers are multiplying faster than producers and productions. The tendency even of the emigration westward is to settle in towns and cities—to inhabit or found urban, rather than to populate rural localities. We hear far oftener of farmers’ sons coming to town to enter stores and offices—to become, as they think, genteel—than of denizens of urban localities betaking themselves to agricultural pursuits. There is an unhealthy love for city life and city dissipation engendered in the mind of youth, which portends ill for the due development of the unequalled agricultural resources of the country.

Then again, much of the labor of the farmers is ill directed. Pork, pork, pork, is raised, to the exclusion of other things which would both pay the farmer better, and redound more to the benefit of the community. It would be much preferable if less pork and more mutton were raised in many agricultural localities. Our farmers have never produced anything like the quantity of wool they might have raised—to say nothing of sheep being infinitely cheaper to keep than hogs, and mutton being more profitable and better to eat than pork.

If a natural and due proportion of this nation were engaged in strictly agricultural pursuits, there would be far less want and distress in our large cities than there now is. But speculation rages so wildly that comparatively few are content to abide the slow but sure returns which await the investment of their capital in the cultivation of the land. The majority prefer to seek wealth in the devious and uncertain paths of trade and commerce. And far too many are content to live by their wits—to exist and consume without producing—without adding in any way to the general wealth of the country. What a blessing would be conferred, not only on the community but on themselves, if the thousands—for they are literally thousands—of men who have practically renounced work, and live by political scheming and depleting the treasury filled by the hard-earned contributions of working men—for it is these who, in reality, pay the taxes—it would be a double blessing if all these thousands would earn an honest living by cultivating the soil and adding to the material wealth of the country, instead of preying like leeches on its vitals.