As a rule, there is more genuine
satisfaction, a truer life, and more obtained from life in the humble cottages
of the poor than in the palaces of the rich. I always pity the sons and
daughters at a later age, but I am glad to remember that they do not know what
they have missed. They have kind fathers and mothers, and
think that they enjoy the sweetness of the blessings to the fullest: but this
they cannot do; for the poor who has in his father his constant companion,
tutor, and model, and in his mother—holy name—his nurse, teacher, guardian
angel, saint, all in one, has a richer, more precious in life than any rich
man’s son who is not so favored can possible know, and compared with which all
other fortunes count for little. It is because I know
how sweet and happy and pure the home of honest poverty is, show free from
perplexing care, from social envies and emulations, how loving and how united
its members may be in the common interest of supporting the family, that I
sympathize with the rich man’s boy congratulate the poor man’s boy; and it is
for these reasons that from the ranks of the poor so many strong, eminent,
self-reliant men have always sprung and always must spring.
If you will read the list of the immortals who "were not born to die,"
you will find that most of them have been born to the precious heritage of
poverty. It seems, nowadays, a matter of universal
desire that poverty should be abolished. We should be quite willing to abolish
luxury, but to abolish honest, industrious, self-denying poverty would be to
destroy the soil upon which mankind produces the virtues which enable our race
to reach a still higher civilization than it now possesses. What is the meaning of the word "perplexing" in paragraph 3