306 TEANSACTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURAL 



that "All worlv and no play" — and had I not sufficiently recovered 

 to read the remainder of the subject, which ended with " makes Jack 

 a dull boy," you certainly would not have been bored with this at- 

 tempt. Surely the subject of " Work and Play " is one which de- 

 mands the careful attention of every head of a family and every em- 

 ployer of labor in this fast, progressive age. People have become so 

 overcharged with the idea that the value to be attached to a human 

 being is to be computed from the amount of labor the individual can 

 be made to perform without physical exhaustion or repairs; that 

 mankind is placed simply upon the level of a machine; and just so 

 rapidly as machine labor can be made to supplant hard labor, just so 

 rapidly does the value of a human being decrease in the minds of 

 many. 



This is not as it should be, and with joy will we hail the day 

 when a change for the better takes place. Had it been the idea of 

 your Secretary to confine this paper simply to the discussion of 

 " Labor and Recreation," as it is connected with the youth of our 

 land, then I might simply look back to the time when it was cus- 

 tomary for the boy to turn the grindstone for five or six hours at a 

 time, while some much more able person held the axe or scythe and 

 went to sleep while resting his weight upon it; or when the boy was 

 called up at four o'clock in the morning to build the fires and milk 

 the cows, and feed the horses, and saw the wood before breakfast, 

 and the remainder of the day to be spent in picking up the down 

 row and helping to husk the other four rows, or carrying together 

 the sheaves of wheat or oats as fast as a uiachine could cut them, 

 while a man who got all the glory and nine-tenths of the pay set 

 them up and fanned himself with his hat, and abused the boy for 

 not walking faster, or for not carrying more than six or eight bun- 

 dles at a time. All these things are fresh in my mind, and I sup- 

 pose are also fresh in the minds of most of the members of this 

 Society. How often do we hear the remark that Tom or John, or 

 Henry or Joe, is no account. He can't stand the work that Dick or 

 Harry can, or he is always fussing with some fool machine, or read- 

 ing some book or writing poetr}^ or wants to go hunting or fishing, 

 or run around with the girls; anything to get out of work. Those 

 who look upon their children as mere labor-saving machines remind 

 me of the man who, after burying his wife, declared that he " had 

 rather lost the best cow he had on the place, and just as spring work 

 was coming on and house-cleaning not done." If we look calmly 

 and impassionately into this matter, we will find that at least nine- 

 tenths of the boys who leave home (and usually against the wish of 

 their parents) to seek their fortunes in our great cities, come from 

 families where their value as members of the family is estimated 

 wholly by the amount of labor they are able and willing to perform, 

 and where no notice is ever paid to social and friendly family rela- 

 tions, and where a respite from the continual grinding of unrelent- 



