Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents Honorable and Dear Sir: It was with great pleasure that your friendly letter reached me two days ago, and after some reflection I am undertaking a reply in the same spirit. I am pleased to have been one of your supporters in the last election, and have continually been friendly to your aims in helping the American people out of the morass in which they were entangled three years ago. Your courage all along has been an inspiration to them. Since you ask for a statement of conditions in our community, and how we feel the government can better serve the people, I shall answer frankly, and to the best of my ability. First of all, the care of the indigent aged and crippled children and those unemployed through no fault of their own, is a most worthy objective. It would seem to me, however, that time is granted the old should be just above subsistence level, for the reason that otherwise savings and preparation for that time is discouraged, and thrift is indirectly penalized. There is already appearing and growing stronger a wide-spread tendency to depend upon the government, which where it appears tends to replace the older American spirit of independence. This may be unavoidable, but in any case it is a sign of decadence and most alarming. It goes along with the failure of personal initiative. Secondly, most of us feel that government spending, while necessary during the past few years, has reached a point where it is creating a mountainous debt which future tax-payers will have to shoulder, to their grief. The budget, we believe, should be balanced with all possible dispatch. Thirdly, there seems to have been created, as a result of necessary relief, a large group of people who had much rather "get along" on what they receive from the dole, than to perform much-needed (but possibly more disagreeable) tasks for which they would receive renumeration. Farmers and housewives are finding it difficult to secure needed assistance. People on relief, once they accept the lower standard, find security, and a complete command of their own time preferable to work. Much-need zeal for work is thus being killed off in this class, which becomes more difficult to satisfy, and to deal with because of its strength at the polls. Its birth rate tends to rise, we are told in Syracuse. This should be a source of great alarm to yourself, honorable Sir. Personally, I believe any further concentration of power in the central government is undesirable and menacing to the hard-won liberties of democracy, which our own nation with England, France and the Scandinavian countries, seems to be preserving in the face of a decadent world. Anything approaching dictatorship is most violently abhorred by the people of this section. With this, we are happy to note an improvement of economic conditions in this city. What I do not note, is an improvement of moral fibre: there is an increasing tendency to exalt the mass man as he is. The ant-hill ideal of society will continue to make inroads in American, unless our moral degeneration can be checked. Respectfully yours,
Rev. Fenimore E. Cooper, Rector
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