It Is Never Too Late To Mend

George Fielding is an honest young man whit no luck or fortune, who dreams of winning the hand of young Susan Merton. Her father, however, doesn't want his daughter to marry a poor farmer, so George leaves to Australia to try his luck there, keeping the contact with Susan through letters. However, a ruthless squire John Meadows becomes obsessed with Susan and sabotages George intercepting letters between lovers and conspiring to have George framed and sent to jail.

This position is not so enviable as it was. Years ago, the farmers of England, had they been as intelligent as other traders, could have purchased the English soil by means of the huge percentage it offered them. But now, I grieve to say, a farmer must be as sharp as his neighbors, or like his neighbors he will break. What do I say? There are soils and situations where, in spite of intelligence and sobriety, he is almost sure to break; just as there are shops where the lively, the severe, the industrious, the lazy, are fractured alike. This last fact I make mine by perambulating a certain great street every three months, and observing how name succeeds to name as wave to wave. Readers hardened by the Times will not perhaps go so far as to weep over a body of traders for being reduced to the average condition of all other traders. But the individual trader, who fights for existence against unfair odds, is to be pitied whether his shop has plate glass or a barn door to it; and he is the more to be pitied when he is sober, intelligent, proud, sensitive, and unlucky.