The boys worked at odd jobs, on farms in Summer, clerking in country stores, driving stage—and be it said to the credit of their father, he allowed them to keep the money they made. Education comes through doing things, making things, going without things, taking care of yourself, talking about things, and when Robert was seventeen he had education enough to teach a "Deestrick School" in Illinois.
To teach is a good way to get an education. If you want to know all about a subject, write a book on it, a wise man has said. If you wish to know all about things, start in and teach them to others.
Bob was eighteen—big and strong, with a good nature and an enthusiasm that had no limit. There were spelling-bees in his school, and a debating-society, that had impromptu rehearsals every night at the grocery. Country people are prone to "argufying"—the greater and more weighty the question, the more ready are the bucolic Solons to engage with it. And it is all education to the youth who listens and takes part—who has the receptive mind.
This love of argument and contention among country people finds vent in lawsuits. Pigs break into a man's garden and root up the potatoes, and straightway the owner of the potatoes "has the law" on the owner of the pigs. This strife is urged on by kind neighbors who take sides, and by the "setters" at the store, who fire the litigants on to unseemliness. Local attorneys are engaged and the trial takes place at the railroad-station, or in the schoolhouse on Saturday. Everybody has opinions, and overrules the "jedge" next day, or not, as the case may be.
This petty strife may seem absurd to us, but it is all a part of the Spirit of the Hive, as Maeterlinck would say. It is better than dead-level dumbness—better than the subjection of the peasantry of Europe. These pioneers settle their own disputes. It makes them think, and a few at least are getting an education. This is the cradle in which statesmen are rocked.
And so it happened that no one was surprised when, in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three, there was a sign tacked up over a grocery in Shawneetown, Illinois, and the sign read thus: "R. G. & E. C. Ingersoll, Attorneys and Counselors at Law."
Shawneetown, Illinois, was once the pride and pet of Egypt. It was larger than Chicago, and doubtless it would have become the capital of the State had it been called Shawnee City. But the name was against it, and dry rot set in. And so today Shawneetown has the same number of inhabitants that it had in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five, and in Shawneetown are various citizens who boast that the place has held its own.
Robert Ingersoll had won a case for a certain steamboat captain, and in gratitude the counsel had been invited by his client to go on an excursion to Peoria, the head of navigation on the Illinois River. The lawyer took the trip, and duly reached Peoria after many hairbreadth 'scapes on the imminently deadly sandbar. But a week must be spent at Peoria while the boat was reloading for her return trip.
There was a railroad war on in Peoria. The town had one railroad, which some citizens said was enough for any place; others wanted the new railroad.