20 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



things can be, no strike by the farm laborer for a larger share of 

 the profits of farming, for there are no great profits to divide. 

 The farm laborer does not ask to shorten his hours of labor, be- 

 cause with those hours shortened his capacity for production 

 would not keep him from starvation. He does not combine to 

 make the farmer pay greater wages, because any substantial in- 

 crease of price would render employment of labor in farming 

 quite impossible. Because of this want of increase of produc- 

 tion on the farm comes the well-known fact that the profits from 

 agricultural labor are the least of any department af human in- 

 dustry. The discoveries of chemistry, the inventions of science 

 have aided it in a degree ; but still comes back to the farmer 

 the normal and primeval condition that " in the sweat of thy 

 face " — (not by the labor of the steam-engine,) — " shalt thou 

 eat thy bread." The profits of investment of capital in farm- 

 ing and of labor on the farm are but little advanced from wliat 

 they were at the beginning of the century. 



I by no means mean to say that farm wages have not risen, 

 but they have risen because of the high prices paid in manufac- 

 turing, mechanical and commercial pursuits, and the higher 

 rewards to be obtained by the investment and employment of 

 capital in such pursuits. Hence it is that all our boys leave the 

 farm to go into other business, hardly one remaining to take 

 care of the homestead ; and hence it is that the father encour- 

 ages the boy to leave the farm to become the broker, the banker, 

 the merchant or the manufacturer — aye, and, too often, en- 

 dorses a note or mortgages the farm to raise the capital with 

 which the boy is to start in business. As the records of mer- 

 cantile and banking pursuits show that only one in a hundred 

 is in a high degree successful, if the boy is unfortunate, then 

 the old homestead goes, and the father and the mother totter 

 down to their graves in helpless poverty, oppressed by the 

 thought that they have been ruined by the darling son, whose 

 haste to be rich they themselves have quickened and urged. 



There is another, but perhaps minor, reason to be considered 

 in learning the causes why there are among the farm laborers no 

 strikes or trades' unions by which an increase of price is de- 

 manded or a diminution of the hours of labor sought. For, al- 

 though during the few months of seed-time and harvest, wages 

 of farm labor are very considerable, yet during the other seasons 



