Windham County Observer

Although one ordinarily supposes that it is the old men who are most in need of charity in a time of depression, the head of a "wayfarers' lodge" in a large middle western city revealed the other day that most of the wanderers helped by his organization lately have been young men—men under thirty, in the vast majority of cases.

Perhaps this is just another reflection of youth's restlessness. When hard times come the old man is apt to find some sort of haven and stick to it. Being wise in the ways of adversity he lets well enough alone. But the young man is likely to go adventuring and see if he can't better himself by going to some distant field.

In the very nature of things a young man is a rover. A depression simply accentuates it. If his own town has no jobs for him, the next town probably will; if that fails, there are other towns, and in one or another of them, given any luck at all, there will be something doing. So, after a while, the young man finds himself a long way from home, and has to hunt up a breadline and free flop-house.

This, at the present time, simply means an added strain for the charitable organizations. Yet this eternal tendency of youth to look for something better on the other side of the next hill can occasionally bring about mighty convulsions in the history of a nation, and no nation has more reasons to know it than the United States.

Who broke through the wilderness and peopled the great west? The young men, restless and dissatisfied in a narrow eastern world where jobs were few and opportunities were hard to grasp. From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, the empty land toward the sunset was a beacon for these "men under thirty" who couldn't make a go of it at home.

Like their brothers of 1931, the young men went roving. They were illogical, foolish very often, poorly prepared for the change; but they created a tremendous empire, and today we speak of them as pioneers and honor them.

Their spirit is moving the young men again. The empty west is gone, and there is no frontier for them to pass. But when they land in the breadlines of strange cities we needn't wag our beards too solemnly. They are simply pioneers in a land that needs pioneers no longer.