The Man With the Hoe. 



Jahes Hilton, New Scotland, N. Y. 



Thirtj-flve years ago a French painter living in the little vil- 

 iage of Barbizon, near Paris, painted a small picture of a weary 

 peasant man, with bent back, heavy, hopeless face and work-worn 

 hands resting upon his hoe. This canvas, together with " The 

 Angelus " — probably the best-known work of this artist in 

 America — was hawked about Paris and finally sold to a small 

 tradesman for an insignificant sum. After the death of Jean 

 Francois Millet, France awakened to the fact that he had been the 

 truest delineator of peasant life the world had ever known. His 

 pictures were sold and resold for fabulous sums, and after, many 

 years the " Man with the Hoe " crossed the ocean to America, the 

 property of a wealthy Californian — (Mr. Crocker)— who paid 

 for it 100,000. People who saw the little picture, dimly felt 

 its ijathos, but it remained for an American gentleman — Prof. 

 Edwin Markham — to interpret the picture in a great poem, which 

 will live as long as literature endures. He has himself told us 

 that when he first saw the " Man with the Hoe " at a loan exhibi- 

 tion in San Francisco, he stood before it an hour, absorbed and 

 enthralled by the sight of this sad shape, w^hich to him seemed 

 not to portray a chance peasant, a mere man of the fields, a figure 

 Millet had chosen to paint simply because of its artistic possibili- 

 ties, Dut to express betrayed humanity — the Toiler, ground down 

 to the level of the brute through ages of oppression and social 

 injustice. He saw in it the working man pushed to the wall by 

 uionopoly and greed, until he had become a mere serf, with no 

 mind in his muscles and no heart in his handiwork. He saw in it 

 the slow, sure, awful degredation of man, through endless, hope- 

 less, joyless labor. This pathetic figure seemed to him the very 

 type of industrial oppression; a being with no outlet to his life, 



