Publisher's Synopsis
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than gotrid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, thatthey might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Whomade them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man iscondemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their gravesas soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these thingsbefore them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have Imet well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road oflife, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables nevercleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot!The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of fles
