hundred times as much. At twelve per cent, it amounts to eighty-four thousand and seventy-five dollars, or more than four thousand times as much. At eighteen per cent, it amounts to fifteen million one hundred and forty-five thousand and seven dollars. At twenty-four per cent, it reaches the enormous sum of two billion, five hundred and fifty-one million, seven hundred and ninety-five thousand, four hundred and four dollars!" One dollar at compound interest, at twenty-four per cent., for one hundred years, would produce a sum equal to our national debt.
13. The Farmer in Debt
Interest eats night and day, and the more it eats the hungrier it grows. The farmer in debt, lying awake at night, can, if he listens, hear it gnaw. If he owes nothing, he can hear his corn grow. Get out of debt, as soon as you possibly can. You have supported idle avarice and lazy economy long enough.
14. Own Your Own Home
There can be no such thing in the highest sense as a home unless you own it. There must be an incentive to plant trees, to beautify the grounds, to preserve and improve. It elevates a man to own a home. It gives a certain independence, a force of character that is obtained in no other way. A man without a home feels like a passenger. There is in such a man a little of the vagrant. Homes make patriots. He who has sat by his own fireside with wife and children, will defend it. Few men have been patriotic enough to shoulder a musket in defense of a boarding-house. The prosperity and glory of our country depend upon the number of people who are the owners of homes.
15. What to do with the Idlers
Our country is filled with the idle and unemployed, and the great question asking for an answer is: What shall be done with these men? What shall these men do? To this there is but one answer: They must cultivate the soil. Farming must be more attractive. Those who work the land must have an honest pride in their business. They must educate their children to cultivate the soil.
16. Farm-Life Lonely
I say again, if you want more men and women on the farms, something must be done to make farm-life pleasant. One great difficulty is that the farm is lonely. People write about the pleasures of solitude, but they are found only in books. He who lives long alone, becomes insane.
17. The Best Farming States
The farmer in the Middle States has the best soil—the greatest return for the least labor—more leisure—more time for enjoyment than any other farmer in the world. His hard work ceases with autumn. He has the long winters in which to become acquainted with his family—with his neighbors—in which to read and keep abreast with the advanced thought of his day. He has the time and means of self-culture. He has more time than the mechanic, the merchant or the professional man. If the farmer is not well informed it is his own fault. Books are cheap, and every farmer can have enough to give him the outline of every science, and an idea of all that has been accomplished by man.
18. The Laborers, the Kings and Queens
The farmer has been elevated through science, and he should not forget the debt he owes to the mechanic, to the inventor, to the thinker. He should remember that all laborers belong to the same grand family—that they are the real kings and queens, the only true nobility.
HOME AND CHILDREN
19. The Family the Only Heaven in this World
Don't make that poor girl play ten years on a piano when she has no ear for music, and when she has practiced until she can play "Bonaparte Crossing the Alps," you can't tell after she has played it whether Bonaparte ever got across or not. Men are oaks, women are vines, children are flowers, and if there is any Heaven in this world it is in the family. It is where the wife loves the husband, and the husband loves the wife, and where the dimpled arms of children are about the necks of both.
20. The Far-Seeing Eyes of Children.
I want to tell you this, you cannot get the robe of hypocrisy on you so thick that the sharp eye of childhood will not see through every veil.
21. Love and Freedom in a Cabin
I would rather go to the forest far away and build me a little cabin—build it myself and daub it with mud, and live there with my wife aud family—and have a little path that led down to the spring, where the water bubbled out day and night, like a little poem from the heart of the earth; a little hut with some hollyhocks at the corner, with their bannered bosoms open to the sun, and with the thrush in the air, like a song of joy in the morning; I would rather live there and have some lattice work across the window, so that the sunlight would fall checkered on the baby in the cradle; I would rather live there and have my soul erect and free, than to live in a palace of gold and wear the crown of imperial power and know that my soul was slimy with hypocrisy.
22. The Turnpike Road of Happiness
Whoever marries simply for himself will make a mistake; but whoever loves a woman so well that he says, "I will make her happy," makes no mistake; and so with the woman who says, "I will make him happy." There is only one way to be happy, and
