You will agree with Dr. Button, Senator Cheadle and Rep- 

 resentative Warner that this is a bad condition; that is, you 

 will agree if you are convinced that these things are so. But 

 let us wait and withhold judgment for a moment. 



Overwork seldom hurts anyone, and less than anyone else 

 is the lumberjack likely to be afflicted with trouble on that 

 score. Most of the men in the lumber camps are fitted per- 

 fectly for their work. You have seen them, big strapping fel- 

 lows; browned by the winds and the sun, strong, sturdy, 

 capable of working from dawn to dusk, utter strangers to 

 fatigue, to whom, apparently exhaustion is practically un- 

 known. Certainly it is not this class of men who suffer 

 from overwork. Out doors constantly, they draw, seemingly, 

 on Nature for their strength, like the heroes of old. The man 

 locked up in the office all day, breathing impure air, straining 

 his eyes and his back over a ledger that man may and 

 frequently does collapse from overwork, but not the lumber- 

 jack. 



What The Records Show. 



And as for disease. The records of both the Red River 

 Lumber Company and of the health offices of the districts in 

 which the company operates fail to show a single case of 

 typhoid fever during the past several years, according to Dr. 

 M. A. Desmond, Akeley, Minn., chairman of the board of 

 health of Hubbard county. If tuberculosis develops in a lum- 

 berjack, it is more than likely it will develop while he is an 

 inmate of the "cheap lodging houses," which Dr. Dutton says 

 they infest when in the cities. 



The districts in Minnesota in which the lumber companies 

 operate are practically virgin. They have yet to know the 

 effeminating touch of civilization; their streams are unpol- 

 luted by the waste of great cities; their springs still flow free 

 and untrammeled; thr air is pure. When the lumberjack 

 brushes the leaves aside from the source of a forest stream, 

 that is gurgling forth from the foot of a tree or bursting from 

 a rocky cavern, he knows he is getting God-given water, that 

 has known no patent filter, and does not need one. When he 

 drops on his stomach beside a river bank and drinks his fill 

 after a hard run, he knows that none of the waste from a 



/ 1^3] 



