Rich Young Men

A few years ago there was exhibited in a foreign art-gailery a picture which attracted an extraordinary amount of attention, lesa on the gronnd of its artistic excellence than froin the inteiest of the subject. On one side of the canvas was depicted a boy in the full bloom of infantile beauty ; on the other a haggard, bottle-nosed, slouching man. Beneath were the words, " Can they be the same'i" A story which we published the other day vividly recalls this picture. The paragraph referred tö" the career of a young man whose exploits have long been the talk of Baltimore, and who must, we presume, preseutly stand in a criminal dock on a capital charge. Readers of lite Autocrat of the Breakast Table will reinember Dr. Holmes' description of the young Marylander. As a type of liianly beauty, Samuel MacDonald might have sat for the portrait. Six years ago he was a splendid youth, and when on coming of age, and into possession of his patrimony, he gave a tete of unprecedented expense to celébrate that event, there were probably few of his guests who failed to regard him with something of envy. "The world was all before him, where to choose." He chose a career of wild excess, such as the Regent Orleans could scarcely have surpassed, and which has culminated in assassination. The scandaU created by his conduct in Baltimore at length drove him froin that, his native city, and he took up his abode in Indiana, with which he had become familiar in hunting expeditions, and where, no doubt, he rejoiced at being freed froin that annoyance which the averted looks of kith and kin cause to even the most abandoned. Thence tidings reached Maryland of his orgies in the West. Surrounded by the most abandoned of both sexes, kis time was passed in hunting expeditions in the wild country within reach of his shooting lodge near Terre Haute, exercises which seemed designed merely to whet his appetite for plunging, on his return, into excesses recalling those committed in the last century at their retreat on the banks of the Thames by " the Monks of Medenham," over whose portal hung the motto whioh they so faithfully followed - ' Do anything you fancy." Never before, probably, were such scènes of riotous and profuse profligacy enacted on this soil as those in MacDonald's lodge, near Terre Haute, and it has been calculated that in one year they absorbed $150,000. The career of this young repróbate wili come home painfulïy to many parents. Eicli youths are in this country a much greater difficulty to their friends than those less liberally provided for. Satan, the old hymu says, fiuds work for idle hands to do, and the richer those hands are the worse is the work. Fortúnate, indeed, may wealthy families deern themselves who are without one of these black sheep. The social conditions here are not what they were when every man had to gut a living. The class of rich young men is rapidly increasing. Every year tbore grow up those who know from the beginning that at most they need ouly play at wortting. Where is the safeguard for such men r WholeBome family influences may do much, but it is chiefly to be found in a liberal education. Only the educated know how to properly enjoy wealth and leisure, and have no need of debauchery and the bottle to stifle the demon ennui. There is ampie work for an educated affluent class in this country ; work which they would achieve position and renown by doing. It has been Baid, and not without reason, that a superior class of Representativos used to come to Congress from many of the Southern States ; because the social and political conditions of those States were such as to produce a considerable number of men of wealth, leisure, and education, who turned to politics as the highest pursuit in which they could engage, and this was why Virginia was the mother of Presidents. The war put an end to that state of things ; but there is no reason why the North Bhould not now give the country men such as they. It cannot be too strongly impressed upon the rich that the success, prosperity, perhaps very oxistence, of the United States depends upon their giving their sons those advantages of education which do so much to forin enlightened, far-sighted, and high-minded Btatesmen. " Why," asked a governess of her little charge, " do we prfty God to give us our daily bread ? Why don't we ask for four days, or a week P" " We want it fresh," replied the ingenious child.