People Of The Country

"For the stability and righteousness of our government we are accustomed to think we must pin our faith on the couatry people who live 'near to nature's heart, ' " writes Mrs. Lyman Abbott in The Ladies' Home Journal, the first of a series of "Peaceful Valley" papers, which picture life in an ideal rural community. "But how many of them, " she says, "seem to have learned anything noble from her? Her beauty does not refine them, her honesty does not incite them to thoroughness, her Eree haudedness does not inspire them to generosity - they become narrow and sordid in the midst of grandeur and liberality. They imagine there can be nothiug in life but work or play, toil or rest, and they feel a contempt for those who play and rest. They have never learned to mingle work and play, toil and rest in due proportion, and they cease to find any pleasure in life unless they abandon work altogether. Like the tired woruan who wrote her own epitaph, they fancy heaven a place where they can 'do nothing forever and ever. ' "Thisviewof life makes loafers in the village as it makes them in the cities. When a different spirit has found room to grow, a new order of living Drevails. Life becomes something more ;han a slow grinding of the mili, more ;han a burden, to be endured only because it cannot be at will laid down. It secomes a luxury as well as a necessity. Individuals combine, not for their own advantage, but to multiply beneEactions, and as strength increases by lts right use, the attainment of one worthy and ambitious advantage is only ;he suggestion and achievement of another. ' '