28 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



reporting ^ages without board, there were six paying S2.00; seven paying- 

 $2.25 ; one jm'ing $2.38; twenty-one paying $2 50, and one paying $3.00 per 

 day. In the entire State, as shown from reports from 585 tovyns, the average- 

 wages paid to harvest hands, with board, was, in 



66 towns $1 00 per day- 



84 towns 1 25 per daj" 



194 towns 1 50 per day 



53 towns 1 75 per day- 



185 towns 2 00 per day- 



3 towns 2 50 per day" 



Sliowing that more than one-fourth of the towns paid $1.25 per day or less ;. 

 nearly three-fifths paid $1.50 per day or less ; while more than two-thirds paid 

 $1.75 or less. Members of the Institute, you have been shown your relation to 

 capital. With the figures already given, can you not see your way clear in your 

 relation to labor, so far as wages are concerned ? Pay such wages that the 

 employe who is given an opportunity to work but a portion of the year may 

 have enough to support himself the balance of the year and make a saving for 

 future use. Or, what would be better, give steady employment to labor. Do 

 you deny the strength of such an assertion? Look at your home circle and tell 

 me Avhy the wife and daughters are obliged to toil so earnestly from morning" 

 until night, beyond the essential duties of the women of the home. Tell me 

 why the sons desire to, and do leave, the farm, where the brightest of all busi- 

 ness opportunities should be centered, and where, from childhood, they have 

 studied and mastered a trade ; tell me why they rush to mercantile centres and 

 seek employment in the store or counting room, driving those who were 

 brought up in the towns to join the mighty throng of surplus labor? The prin- 

 cipal and most direct answer should be, that yourself and wife are aged at 50 

 years, your sons and your daughters are disarmed of all love and respect for 

 the farm, because of your desire to add to your capital at a more rapid rate than, 

 the laws of physical nature will permit. The days of pioneer life in Michigan 

 are over. There is no demand for this distress you bring upon the physical 

 body of yourself and family. With more labor help, your faculties unimpaired,, 

 having needed rest, your children educated, and the sons especially taught the 

 mechanical knowledge which has been so wisely made an important feature of 

 our Agricultural College and other institutions of learning, and your life is not 

 only happy, but the soil is made to bear a richer increase, because of the 

 life and vigor enjoyed by those who till it. By the employment of more labor 

 you not only give yourselves a proper rest, but you are enabled to bring the 

 hours of labor for your employes within a rational limit. I well understand 

 that in the harvest season the daily hours of toil are generally considered as- 

 necessarily greater in number than in ordinary seasons. You make them 

 greater than they should be. If two persons do a certain amount of work in 

 fifteen hours each, three persons will do the same in ten hours each. And 

 though you have paid the extra wage to the third person, you have placed the 

 two persons in a physical condition to more than earn that extra wage back in 

 the days that are before you. Your relation to labor is not that of the master 

 to the slave ; you are generally on an equal footing, so far as the rights of citi- 

 zenship enter into the ques ion of relation. Labor may be greatly below you 

 in the social and educational scale. On the farm is your opportunity to 

 advance it. Let the hours of toil be so arranged that the body, not over 

 fatigued, may find refreshment, and the mind education in the reading and 

 study of the newspapers and books which your home is permitted to possess. 



