by all sound economy or one which so rudely strikes at the foundation of all social prosperity as the poor laws of Great Britain. Unwise in their conception, unhappy in their consequences, they are the shame and curse of England.

Disregarding the finer and fuller provisions of nature for the relief of the destitute and unfortunate, they substitute instead the compulsory provisions of a legalized benevolence. The charitable offering is snatched from the kind hand of the benevolent giver, cast into the swelling poor fund and distributed by the cold hand of a soulless official alike to the vicious and deserving. The donor is deprived of his meed of praise, the recipient is precluded the exercise of gratitude.

But not only do such provisions fail to relieve the wants of the poor by sapping the life's blood of individual energy and encouraging indolence and consequent vice; they increased the evil they were intended to alleviate and supersede the more efficacious relief of individual charity. The ever present consciousness that, however great his improvidence and vice, he cannot be brought to ultimate want removes that stimulus to industry and economy which has in the wise providence of God been provided to anticipate the evils of pauperism. The shame which attaches itself to the trembling prayer for individual charities is lost in the demand upon the parish poor fund. . . . . . Can it be possible that this is indeed the true character of those laws which her wisest statesmen have not only sustained but made the subject of boastful reflection upon other lands? As well might the highway robber, after having stripped the defenseless traveller of all that he possessed, return him a scanty covering from the cold, and then boast of kindness, and call upon his shivering victim to acknowledge a debt of gratitude.

"Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey

When wealth accumulates and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade,
A breath can make them and a breath has made,
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied."

The extract is honorable to the speaker. Appreciation of the sorrows of the poor is seldom more fervidly expressed. A critic will forgive the redundancy of adjectives, remembering that it is a disease of young students soon cured. He will not fail also to be struck with the direction of the argument, while there can be no doubt of the side taken. Those familiar with him know Ben jamin Harrison, now mature in years, is still bravely on the same side.

5

CHAPTER III.

THE LAWYER.

LOVE of one's alma mater is not an impulse of graduation. Upon the going forth the young man. is all confidence; the world is the reverse of awful to him; it is a field of which he has simply to take possession; or it is the sleeping beauty of Triermain, and he the hero assigned to awake her; the lions, goblins, and thunders along the way are only accessories to make the achievement more remarkable. The popularity of the first picture in the series of Cole's "Voyage of Life," a radiant youth in a shallop flying against a rippled current toward the luminous temple in the sky, is due less to excellence of art than to the truth of the portrayal. Years after exit from the narrow walls of the college, when the slips and disappointments in the career so eagerly challenged have been endured, then it is that the man becomes conscious that his student days were days of exceeding pleasantness.

Benjamin Harrison at the moment of issuance from the university may have felt himself a man in reality he was but a boy. Nevertheless he did (66)

not lose an hour in idle farewells to places of his college trials and triumphs. From labor he went to labor, with two incentives to make him manful -poverty and a trustful fiance.

Exactly when he had determined to be a lawyer cannot be stated. He himself cannot fix the time. The probabilities are that it was when he was passing through the preparatory studies at Farmer's College.

Inclination to a pursuit is referable to tastes. The votary feels the stir of capacity long before he enters upon the profession. The artist manifests it in a facility to draw; the soldier discovers it in love of parades and the incidents of the camp; the mechanic and the poet are often born such. It may perhaps be said that multitudes of young men in our country drift toward the law not from any manifest aptitude for it, but because it has been, if it is not now, the directest path to political prizes. This remark cannot be applied to young Harrison. His mental qualities, the gift of nature, are all those of the lawyer as contradistinguished from the politician. Thus drawn to it by innate aptitude, he was further controlled in the choice by one great necessity of his situation.

The farm upon which he was raised had at one time been a considerable possession. Originally there were five hundred acres of it; but his father had been careless in management. His habits of life were in a degree inherited. He was

liberal and generous to a fault. He delighted in the entertainment of strangers as well as of friends. He was never deaf to appeals for assistance. Did a neighbor need an indorser, he addressed himself to John Scott Harrison, and was never refused. When the paper fell due and the principal was not ready to meet it, an extension became necessary, the burthen of which too frequently fell upon the surety. If further security was required, a mortgage was executed upon the home farm. After a while came judgments and foreclosures. To save the estate John Scott himself became a borrower. So, in the course of years, his affairs went from bad to worse, and finally, as has been stated, he was stripped of everything. Through the kindness of relatives, he retained possession of the premises. The family, however, were in a certain sense depend

ents.

Such was the condition of the father when young Benjamin passed from Farmer's College into Miami University. Such was his condition when, two years afterwards, at the age of eighteen, the son issued from the university. So, when the latter resolved to adopt the law as his profession, the probabilities are that he was mainly moved by the prospect of finding it the shortest avenue to livelihood. Ambition might have had something to do with the choice, but it was a lesser influence.