LECTURES AND ESSAYS READ AT INSTITUTES. 411 



where his shirt opens, burned as brown as a Thanksgiving turkey, by the 

 summer sun. For these, and the innumerable petty hardships of uncomforta- 

 ble home life, there is for the farm boy only the consolation found by a wise 

 old lady in the eighth verse of the fourteenth chapter of Nicodemus, "Grin 

 and bear it," or leave the farm; and there is this item against evolution here, 

 that the boy doesn't naturally grin. 



Dislike of labor, and the hard practical things of life, before the habit of 

 working has become a second nature, drives many boys from the farm. There 

 is nothing ennobling in the drudgery of labor as seen by the average farmer 

 boy. The grave talk about the dignity of labor is mainly gas. The whole 

 movement of civilization is to force the inorganic world to do the work which 

 men have had to do. Everybody looks forward to the time when machinnery 

 will do about all that can be done. Most of the heavy work may now be done 

 with wind, steam, and horses. Machines already plant, hoe, and shell the 

 corn, dig the potatoes, mow the grass, ted, rake, load, and unload the hay, 

 sow, reap, bind, and thresh the grain; and no telling how soon we may run 

 breaking-up teams by telephone, split rails by electricity, and shear sheep by 

 steam. Whatever has been the case in the past — and now in frontier districts, 

 — when timber was to be cleared, stumps pulled, mortgages lifted, buildings 

 erected ; when it was a long way to market, and produce was paid for in trade ; 

 when all implements were clumsily hacked out at home, or hammered out by 

 the nearest blacksmith, there need be less drudgery now, on the improved 

 farm, and the need is growing less year by year. Taking the years together, 

 the farmer need work fewer hours a day than the mechanic, the artisan, or 

 other laborers. The average lawyer and doctor in good practice work more 

 hours a day than the farmer is olsliged to ; and the grocer, editor, and book- 

 keeper have less time to spend with their families than the farmer who envies 

 them their easy life, may have. Providence never designed man to be a mere 

 mill-horse, treading forever the same dull, unvarying round, all for grist upon 

 grist, till the steady, unceasing grind ends in stupidity and blindness. Yet 

 many farmers still persist in getting up, and routing out their families at four 

 o'clock in the morning the year round, and working tvvelve or fifteen hours a 

 day, — with a rest of fifteen minutes morning, noon, and night, for feeding, 

 bolting meals with no more of the dignity and amenities of life at the table 

 than may be found at the manger during cattle-foddering — and this kept up 

 six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, except rainy days, when they work in 

 the garden or go fishing, and Sundays, when they salt the cattle in the fore- 

 noon, and in the afternoon sleep at home or in the meeting-house, through a 

 hard routine of ritual servitude, changing the work-day garments of the 

 slave only for the Sunday sackcloth of the sinner, seeing the blue heavens 

 only as the roof of a work-house or the dome of a sepulchre. And the boys 

 have to work — don't forget this. The idea of labor is instilled into their 

 minds. It is rammed in tight, and rammed loose again; it is rammed in with 

 illustrations, and rammed in with demonstrations; it is rammed in in every 

 conceivable way, with every imaginable kind of ramrod. Home, whicli ought 

 to be a paradise, is a penitentiary. If a boy isn't too tired to play ball, skate, 

 slide down hill, or go to spelling-school, he isn't too tired to split wood, churn, 

 feed the pigs, tend the baby, or run on errands. All his animal spirits are 

 conscientiously directed in channels of industry and usefulness, and he never 

 has what he calls "a good time." .In some farmers' families yet the gad is a 

 constant quantity. There is a well-grounded belief that a boy's memory is 

 strengthened, his wits sharpened, and his conscience quickened by frequent 



