excellent suggestion in mind, we will take up arms only long enough to shoot Mr. Garrison and Mr. Daniels, and then lay them down again and return to our proper business.

One might, perhaps, end with this generalization; but when one presumes to give advice one ought above all things to be practical. So I say further that the first practical step toward permanent peace is to bring about a more diffused material well-being. Permanent peace must have its roots struck deep in this, for peace cannot possibly be interesting or attractive so long as without reason or purpose it keeps so many of us so very poor. The federal investigation of an industry particularly fostered by Mr. Carnegie found a third of its men working seven days a week; half its men working twelve hours a day; and nearly half the force receiving less than two dollars a day. Another federal investigation, covering industries that employ an aggregate of seven million men, found one seventh of them out of employment at one time or another during the year. The New York State Factory Investigating Commission, whose recent hearings were fully reported in that best of newspapers, the New York Evening Post, found that out of a total of 104,000 persons, one eighth earn less than five dollars a week; one third, less than seven; two thirds, ten or less; and one sixth, fifteen or more. It found that in New York City, out of 15,000 women industrially employed, 8,000 got less than six dollars and a half a week during the busy season last year.

I touch these matters as lightly as I can. Our old friend Josiah Bounderby could not get it out of his head that the complaints of the Coketown hands were never based on anything but licentious hankerings for venison and turtle soup out of a gold spoon. Possibly some of the peace advocates share

this view, and if so their feelings must be respected. I therefore hasten to assure them that I have no thought of muckraking; I condemn nothing, complain of nothing. I merely say that peace cannot possibly compete with war for the suffrage of such as can, by the hardest work, earn no more than two dollars a day; or for the suffrage of seven million men whom peace compels to live so precariously that one seventh of them are mere floaters. I say that it is the sheer delirium of vanity to suppose that a peace which permits so many of us to live under such disabling economic circumstances can be attractive, interesting, or permanent. It is unreasonable to expect it, preposterous to talk about it; and so long as the peace advocates entertain or acquiesce in any such notion, their efforts will appear to us only as the amiable pottering of elderly amateurs.

Within the last five years America has laid hold of this first element in the peace problem. The country is thoroughly interested (though not with peace as the specific object in view) in the wider diffusion of material well-being. Whoever has anything to say about it may command the country's attention. I therefore make the peace advocates a proposition wherein I believe I speak for as many as forty million people. If they will cease expostulating with us about the horrors of war, and plan for us the first constructive move toward a peace that is even reasonably interesting, we will follow to a man. If they will do for the institutions of peace what Lee or Paul Pau has done for the institutions of war, they may count on us for the same grade of loyalty, and just as much of it, as Lee or Paul Pau ever commanded.

We really want peace. We want precisely such a peace as our friends the peace advocates themselves find interesting, and such as with all the superi

I

I SPENT seven years in academic and professional studies under excellent teachers. I have spent seven years in agricultural pursuits under the hard knocks of the farm. Which has constituted the better part of my education? My wife, whose academic education was of a high order, often raises this question for herself as well as for me. Of this we are assured to have lived on a farm under the conditions that we have experienced and with the motives that have actuated us during these seven years, has called out a development of manhood and womanhood as amazing as it was unexpected.

After my seven years' professional training I was for twenty-five years the minister of a church in a rather large centre of population on the Mississippi River. During this time I taught classes, participated in clubs, and promoted and attended lectures, all these activities going far toward continuing for me the spirit and habits of the university. I also enjoyed rather wide social opportunities and was associated with business and professional men in many-sided civic activities.

Is it, then, beside the mark to say that I had enjoyed a fair share of the best that books and the best that the associations of a city can yield? When a man thus trained and habituated broke completely with his past and became a farmer, working ten to fourteen

hours a day with the workmen on a farm, what would you imagine happened?

One of the first things to happen of which I was vividly conscious, was that I was acquiring or regaining hardihood. If you ask me, then, what the farm can do for a man, I will reply that it can give him hardness, or hardiness, or hardihood.

During all the period I was in the city there was not a year when I did not row, play golf and tennis, climb mountains, keep up vigorous walking. I pursued these exercises both as a delight and as a necessity; and yet when I became a farmer, their worth, as a means of physical invigoration, struck me as laughable, although I do not overlook their value under our present social conditions.

But the man who is at work ten to twelve hours a day on the farm, taking the weather as it comes; putting under strain more muscles than Dr. Sargent with his gymnastic equipments ever called into play; forcing himself to endure unceasingly the nasty and disagreeable; running the risk of physical injury at every turn (an accident policy costs a farmer three times as much as it does a minister; three several times during these seven years I escaped death by the narrowest margin); and standing ever ready to offer up his body, if not as a sacrifice, then as the unshrinking servant of whatsoever demand exigent crops and still more exigent stock can

lay upon him,—such a man, I say, feels a quality of physical valor growing up within him that puts to shame what he knew of himself in the city. So at least I found it.

Over and above the hardiness which the farm engenders, and of a far higher quality, is the moral courage it calls into play. Courage is the elemental virtue, for life has been and will forever be a fight. A farmer's life is one incessant fight. Think what he dares! He dares to try to control the face of this planet. In order to raise his crops he pits himself against the weather and seasons; he forces the soil to his wishes; he wars against the plant world, the animal world, the insect world, the bacterial world. Is not that a fight, looked at philosophically, to make one stand aghast? After I had been on the farm seven years, the tremendousness of the fight that my fellow farmers were waging disclosed itself to me with a force no figure of speech can convey.. Until one can be brought to some realization of this aspect of the farmer's life, he has no adequate grounds for comprehending the discipline and development which in the very nature of the case that life must receive. I often contrast the lot of the clerk at his books, or the mechanic at his bench, or the professional man at his desk, with the lot of the farmer. The dangers and uncertainties they confront seem to me extraordinarily mild compared with the risk the farmer runs. That the former will be paid for their work is almost certain; it is extremely uncertain whether the farmer will be paid for his. He must dare to lose at every turn; scarcely a week passes in which he does not lose, sometimes heavily, sometimes considerably. Those moments in a battle when it seems as if every plan had gone to smash, which so test the fortitude of a general, are moments which a farmer experiences more frequently and more

strenuously than men in most occupations. If he sticks to his task successfully his capacity for courage must grow to meet the demands; if he will not stick, he is sifted out by force of circumstance, leaving the stronger type of man to hold the farms.

Initiative surely one of the secrets of leadership - may be selected next, to illustrate the virtues which are called into play by the multitude of difficulties under which the farmer labors. It is amazing how incessantly he runs up against totally new situations. Day by day I felt the conviction deepening in me that no matter what blind wall we ran up against, a door through it must and could be found. I fear that a great majority of people, at least in a great majority of cases, simply sit down when they run up against a blind wall. If they can call the plumber, or the butcher, or the gardener, or the laundress, or the shoemaker, or the blacksmith, or the dairyman, or the horse-tamer then a way out will be made for them. And that is what your city life tends to do for your boys and girls - set them to calling upon an endless variety of specialists to help them surmount life's problems. On the other hand, farmer boys and girls must learn to be all these specialists. The consequence is, they grow up with the feeling that they can and must do it, no matter what befalls; and that feeling, or I greatly miss my count, is the secret of the power of initiative. This power, which the farm lad going up to the city carries with him, he retains as a man; and hence to these country-bred falls by an inherent law of nature the leadership of nations. Surely such leadership exists or it would not be found that eighty-seven per cent of the men and women listed in Who's Who in America were country-bred.

But it is to be noted that a goodly percentage of farmers and farm-hands cannot meet the strain involved in this

demand for initiative. It requires a readiness in original thinking and in resoluteness of spirit to which they are not equal. I have come to the conclusion, after careful reflection, that no one thing does more to drive men away from the farm into the city than these requirements. I noticed that as long as our work was mere routine which went along without a hitch, even though physically it was trying, all went well. But when machinery broke down, the stock played the unexpected, the weather and soil combined to put up new problems, so that we had to wrestle and worry, think and hold on hard; then you had to watch or the men would be 'off,' or if not 'off,' then 'at outs' with you. The call for initiative overtaxed their natural powers, and in a moment of disgust they would resolve to leave for the city, where they believed they would not have to 'stick it out' under so much that is difficult, vexing, exhausting, and baffling. And in this belief they were certainly right. For shop work, in this respect, is far easier than farm work. The six movements regarded by the Ford Automobile Company as the maximum to secure the largest output by a laborer at his machine, present a pitiable contrast to the endless variety of thought-provoking tasks to which the farmer is daily called.

The effects wrought upon the farmer's character by the exactingness or exigency of farm work constitute a most important part of his experience.

Unceasingly we farmers are made to realize that a task delayed is a task rendered increasingly difficult. Build the fence to-day; a month from now the post holes will cost you twice as much. Sow the alfalfa to-day; not another day in the season can it be sown with success. Pick up that strand of barbed wire today; to-morrow your horse will be maimed by it. So fall, day by day, demonstrations of the needfulness of

'doing it now,' until the desire to be prompt, to snatch the opportunity, becomes almost an obsession. Great as is the demand in the city for promptness, it is not so unpitying as the country demand, because in the city the demand comes largely through people, and people are not so exigent as things. People will receive excuses, provide substitutes, alter requirements. Things will not; things, therefore, are more unmercifully exigent than human masters. Disciplined under such masters, it seems to me the country-bred must have greater ingrained power to do the hard thing and 'do it now' than the city-bred.

Closely allied to the exigency of nature under which the farmer so prevailingly lives is the parsimony of nature. Nature does indeed yield some sixty, some a hundred-fold for labor done. But do you know what the average annual accumulation of the average Iowa farm is, omitting the rise in the value of the land? It is $164, according to the way the Assistant Attorney-General of Nebraska figured it out from the United States census tables for an Iowa audience. According to these figures the average Iowa farmer is getting ahead $164 a year by his farm operations.1 Does that seem as if nature pays bountifully? I think she is considerably more bountiful than the figures indicate, for I do not believe they took into account all the factors in the business; yet a survey of fifty counties in Illinois discloses the fact that an overwhelming majority of the farmers were

1 Investigation of the accounts of 400 farms in Wisconsin made by the State University shows that the average annual accumulation amounts to $800, without deducting the living expenses of the family. Were that deduction made, the average would probably be something over $500; so the amount found to prevail in Iowa according to the figures gathered by the experts of the United States Department of Agriculture is surely a pitiably small wage!-THE AUTHOR.