The Old Cry

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THE OLD CRY.—

An editor in Harrisburg, Penn., sits in his office and writes the whole West an unmitigated humbug, as far as it offers inducements to poor men to emigrate. This is well enough. But of all places in the world the people of Pennsylvania ought to be thankful that the West is what it is. In Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, but especially in Ohio, you can count by the thousand the fat old Dutchmen farmers who spent their youth, and so did their fathers before them, delving in the ore mountains or sweating in the iron works, and living in comparative poverty, who are now the wealthy men of the country. In that State it is proverbial, when [cut away] a good farm, large house and fat fields, there lives a Pennsylvania farmer.” Besides, the [cut away] keeps those old black Pennsylvania furnaces in blast, and helps very largely to keep day laborers there in work. Riding in the [cut away] recently we met a well known iron dealer from Pittsburgh, who said as a small item of his business in the West, “I have just sold one hundred tons of rod iron to one establishment for this summer’s manufacture of lightning rods in Illinois.” The glass business is as much indebted to the west as is the iron. Let the honest pious descendants of Hollanders from the Low Countries and of broad brims of more honest times, if they cannot move West themselves to better their condition, at least reverently get down on their knees every morning, and, turning their faces towards the West, say, “give us this day our daily bread.”