Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/144

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS

Naseby, and at Preston; they were at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga, and at Monmouth; and in his own person had battled for the same great cause in the war which preserved the Union of the States.

The poverty of the frontier, where all are engaged in a common straggle, and where a common sympathy and hearty cooperation lighten the burdens of each, is a very different poverty — different in kind, different in influence and effect — from that conscious and humiliating indigence which is every day forced to contrast itself with neighboring wealth on which it feels a sense of grinding dependence. The poverty of the frontier is, indeed, no poverty. It is but the beginning of wealth, and has the boundless possibilities of the future always opening before it. No man ever grew up in the agricultural regions of the West, where a house-raising, or even a corn-husking is a matter of common inter- est and helpfulness, with any other feeling than that of broad-minded, generous independence. This honorable independence marked the youth of Garfield as it marks the youth of millions of the best blood and brain now training for the future citizenship and future government of the Republic. Garfield was born heir to land, to the title of freeholder which has been the patent and passport of self-respect with the Anglo-Saxon race ever since Ilengist nnd ITorsa landed on the shores of England. His adventure on the canal — an alternative between that and the deck of 114

�� �