"You are perfectly welcome to any aid I can give you. Just now some of
us are interested in getting our people out of these wretched alleys and
crowded tenement houses into the larger, freer air of the country. We
want our young men to help us fight the battle against poverty,
ignorance, degradation, and the cold, proud scorn of society. Before our
public lands are all appropriated, I want our young men and women to get
homesteads, and to be willing to endure privations in order to place our
means of subsistence on a less precarious basis. The land is a basis of
power, and like Anteus in the myth, we will never have our full measure
of material strength till we touch the earth as owners of the soil. And
when we get the land we must have patience and perseverance enough to
hold it."

"In one of our Western States is a city which suggests the idea of
Aladdin's wonderful lamp. Where that city now stands was once the
homestead of a colored man who came from Virginia and obtained it under
the homestead law. That man has since been working as a servant for a
man who lives on 80 acres of his former section, and who has plotted the
rest for the city of C."

"How did he lose it?"

"When he came from the South the country was new and female labor in
great demand. His wife could earn $1.50 a day, and instead of moving on
his land, he remained about forty miles away, till he had forfeited his
claim, and it fell into the hands of the present proprietor. Since then
our foresight has been developing and some months since in travelling in
that same State, I met a woman whose husband had taken up a piece of
land and was bringing it under cultivation. She and her children