Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/76

 6o THE GRANITE MONTHLY.

in the coming years. Places where industry and commerce, prosperity and promise were sufficient to attract the most energetic and ambitious of a former generation, are now regarded as slow, as offering insufficient inducements ; the best business and professional capacity seeks the wider field of some great or growing metropolis ; but if there is one thing beyond others which shall help such towns, it is encouragement from those who have been successful, it is a cheering word from your own town, it is an expressionof sympathy from the older about to depart, and this Mr. Hackett was ever ready, heartily, to bestow.

If, however, these smaller cities are not so open to great business enterprises and speculations, by which large fortunes are quickly made and often as quickly vanish, as the centres of trade, they offer, perhaps, a better field for the culti- vation of habits of persistent application and economy, — and here Mr. Hackett was a remarkable example..

Within a few years, and chiefly as the result of our civil war, our social life has undergone a great change. Expensive habits of living, an aversion to the quiet, plodding, but certain means of competency and success, a determination to gain wealth rapidly, all fed by the same spirit of speculation which the false prosperity of war always arouses, spread over the land from the Stock Exchange of New York to the raffle, grab-bag, or lottery in some form or other of every village church which consecrates gambling in the name of Christ. Persistent, steady application to employment has greatly gone out of fashion. The Englishman was complaining of this country, because there were no gentry, — persons, he said, who did nothing, and whose fathers before them did nothing ; and the American replied that we had plenty such, only we called them tramps. It is the tramp spirit, even in spite of our excellent law, which possesses only too many, a willingness to do anything rather than lead a life of patient, persistent, and accumulative labor. There is a well-known algebraical puzzle, by which the assumption that nothing equals nothing leads us to the unexpected result that one equals two. This is what all illegitimate business is attempting to do, but it is' only a puzzle and deception still. Young men are fatuously blind to the lengthening shadow which these faults of overreaching and busi- ness dishonor throw adown their whole future. It is the fleck of mildew which eats and grows blacker and spreads from year to year. It is the steady purpose of square dealing which in the vast multitude of cases brings even the surer outward success in the long run, — like the divine favor falling as dew upon the fleece of Gideon, though all the earth besides is dry and sterile in dishonesty.

But while Mr. Hackett was a conspicuous example of patient industry and careful economy, he was not neglectful, from the beginning, of those expendi- tures on which the social welfare rests. He was never reluctant to bear his part in all educational, charitable, political, and religious affairs. He did not wait for that until all interests grew weak and fitful ; and because of his sup- port of all these, as essential to the purity of society, he became, year by year, a more prominent citizen ; and because of a sturdier avoidance of those early and later dissipations which exhaust the body as well as the fortune, we found him, at the age of seventy-five, full of manly strength and vigor, his natural force unabated, his interest and generosity in the public welfare only increasing. This was nowhere more observable than in his loyalty to the church of his choice. It is fashionable for young men to say that the church is too costly ; but the truth is their own interests centre upon other things ; or with a thought- lessness, and indecision, and indifference to all doctrines, they really go where whim or fashion carries them, or go not at all. There is not the finest church in any city where one cannot find a seat for the tenth part of what his cigars are costing him, if only he thought a tenth part as much of God as of a cigar;

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