better than here? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than
here, raise corn and wheat and oats without work? Will anybody there,
any more than here, do your work for you? If you intend to go to work,
there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not
intend to go to work, you cannot get along anywhere. Squirming and
crawling about from place to place can do no good. You have raised no
crop this year, and what you really want is to sell the land, get the
money, and spend it. Part with the land you have, and, my life upon
it, you will never after own a spot big enough to bury you in. Half
you will get for the land you will spend in moving to Missouri, and
the other half you will eat and drink and wear out, and no foot of
land will be bought. Now, I feel it is my duty to have no hand in such
a piece of foolery. I feel that it is so even on your own account, and
particularly on mother's account. The eastern forty acres I intend to
keep for mother while she lives; if you will not cultivate it, it will
rent for enough to support her; at least, it will rent for something.
Her dower in the other two forties she can let you have, and no thanks
to me. Now do not misunderstand this letter. I do not write it in any
unkindness. I write it in order, if possible, to get you to face the
truth, which truth is, you are destitute because you have idled away
all your time. Your thousand pretenses deceive nobody but yourself. Go
to work is the only cure for your case.

A volume of disquisition could not put more clearly before the reader
the difference between Abraham Lincoln and the common run of Southern
and Western rural laborers. He had the same disadvantages that they
had. He grew up in the midst of poverty and ignorance; he was poisoned
with the enervating malaria of the Western woods, as all his fellows
were, and the consequences of it were seen in his character and
conduct to the close of his life. But he had, what very few of them