of obstacles to be overcome; dangerous and toilsome work to be done. It is a chance for the man to maintain the struggle for existence if he is strong enough to conquer obstacles; if not, then he may lie down and die of despair on the face of the boon and not a breeze, or a leaflet, or a sunbeam will vary its due course to help or pity him. This is the only attitude in which we find nature when we come face to face with her in her original attitude toward mankind; it is only when we come to meet her, armed with knowledge, science, and capital, that we force back her limitations and win some wider and easier chances of existence for ourselves.
Robinson Crusoe enjoyed the boon of nature. He climbed to the top of his island and looked about, "monarch of all he surveyed," not a human soul to divide or dispute it with him; but he sank down in despair, thinking himself the most miserable of living creatures, just because he had the boon all to himself and because the maintenance of his existence was such a crushing task. How many men in the United States to-day could maintain their existence each on a square mile of land, in its natural condition, in the temperate zone, if they were cut off from society and civilization?
Only the hardiest and strongest men are now capable of breaking up land in a state of nature, and beginning the reduction of it to human use, even when they have the resources of the arts and capital, and are supported and reinforced all the time by a strong civilized society behind them. There are millions of acres of the "boon" now open to any one who will go to them, and none go but those who are at the same time physically the strongest and socially the worst off of living men. The existing landowners of the United States are represented to be holding, unjustly, exclusive possession of what nature
