Alpena Weekly Argus

A Remedy for Hard Times.

The editor of the Bureau, Ill., Republican writes in reference to the hard times, of which considerable is heard in different portions of the country. The editor thinks there are other causes for the general complaint than the exactions of the railway monopolists, and there is too much scheming to get a living without rendering an equivalent in honorable labor.

"Our boys," he says, "are not learning useful trades; our farmers' sons are crowding into the small towns and cities seeking after positions as clerks: our girls refuse to do housework, and so we are sending to Europe for workmen, and buying of their artisans millions' worth of products and manufactures that we ought to make for ourselves. Though our crop of rascals is heavy, we do not grow our hemp; though we are overrun with lads who deserve flagellation, we import our willows. Our women (unless we are greatly deceived) shine in foreign fabrics, and our men are dressed in foreign clothes. We are like the farmer who hires his neighbor's sons to chop his wood, feed his stock, and run his errands, while his own sons loaf around saloons and spend their time in playing billiards and gambling, and then wonders why, in spite of his best efforts, he sinks annually deeper and deeper into debt, till the sheriff cleans him out, and he starts West to begin again. The time has come for us to turn over a new leaf. Our boys and girls must be taught to love labor by qualifying themselves to do it efficiently. We must turn out fewer professionals, and more skilled artisans and producers. We must grow and fabricate the immense quantity of articles that we now annually import, and so reduce the foreign debt that we have so long and so successfully augmented year by year. We must qualify our clever boys to erect and run factories, saw-mills, rolling-mills, machine-shops, tanneries, to open and work mines, improve and fashion implements, and double the product of the farms. If we shall adopt this policy, and then take such measures as will correct the abuses growing out of our mammoth railway privileges, we shall witness a true development of national prosperity that will be as firm as the everlasting hills."