Interesting Quote

From A Reverence for Wood, by Eric Sloane (1965):

...It was at this meeting in 1765 that the word "independence" took on a special and widespread meaning.

"With our land's wealth," said one Boston merchant, "we can all afford to be independent. There is probably nothing a man needs that we cannot make or grow in America. Look about you! Except for a piece of silk here and there, the clothes on our backs and every stick in our houses is American. We can be, indeed we are, the most independent people on earth!"

Mr. Sloane goes on to say:

Those days, when the nation was struggling to be born, were perhaps our most poignant times, for it was an era when each man was forced to live with piercing intensity and perception. Two centuries later, when an American turns on the water and the lights in his apartment, he has little awareness of where those things come from; the greatest pity, however, is that he says, "Who cares where it comes from, as long as it keeps on coming?"

In 1765 everything a man owned was made more valuable by the fact that he had made it himself or knew exactly from where it had come. This is not so remarkable as it sounds; it is less strange that the eighteenth-century man should have a richer and keener enjoyment of life through knowledge than that the twentieth-century man should lead an arid and empty existence in the midst of wealth and extraordinary material benefits.

Mary Susan