culture and refinement must yield to its imperious demands. But are there not 

 some cases where this exhausting toil is kept up from force of habit, from avarice 

 or from sheer ambition of work, when necessity has begun to relax somewhat the 

 sternness of its grip ? I have known many farmers who could amply afford to 

 lead hves of comparative ease, still continuing their labor in the fields with their 

 workmen, begininng as early, working as late, and working as hard as the best of 

 them. It was thought to be necessary to get the most out of help, and to get the 

 work properly done, that the employer should thus lead the field. But the mas- 

 ter mechanic does not find it necessary to lead his journeymen in this way in then- 

 rougher work, but confines his activity to direction and supervision, and why 

 cannot the farmer of means do the same ? He is unconsciously doing a double 

 wrong by pushing his ambition of work so far beyond the bounds of necessity, — 

 first to himself, in the loss of that refinement of mind and character which his 

 prosperity has brought within his reach ; and secondly, to poorer men who need 

 employment in order to a Uvelihood. 



farmers' wives. 

 And what is true of farmers in this respect is equally ti*ue of then- wives, 

 with whom the necessity, or the ambition of work not only stands in the way of 

 their social and intellectual culture, but is often fatal to health, to happiness, and 

 to fife itself. They are on the whole, I believe, the hardest worked class in the 

 community. It was, I imagine, a worn-out farmer's wife who wrote, or suggest- 

 ed, a recent poem entitled, "A Tired Woman's Wish," in which she gives expres- 

 sion to her highest idea of Heaven, as a place where she might ' 'do nothing for- 

 ever and ever." But severe as woman's lot is on the farm it is doubtless much 

 less severe than it was in former times, the cheese factory, the creamery, and the 

 milk-train, serving to relieve her from some of the burdens that pressed so heav- 

 ily on the mother and grandmother before her. And the same amelioration has 

 been effected out of doors by the use upon the farm of labor-saving machinery, 

 in which the use of horse-jDower and steam-power are put in the place of the wear 

 and tear of human muscles. We are not likely, I think, to over-rate the eleva- 

 ting effect which these means for saving labor will ultimately have on the life of 

 the farmer and his household. I never see a farmer on his mower or reaper, rid- 

 ing Hke a king or conqueror through the harvest fields where his ancestors toiled 

 like galley slaves, without seeing in the machine something more than an apph- 

 ance for increasing the products of the soil ; it becomes an instrument for a still 

 higher use, for the culture and refinement of the farmer himself. For say what 

 you will about the dignity of labor, and no one, I am sure, can have a higher ap- 

 preciation of that truth than I have, — too much labor with the muscles tends to 

 the repression of the social and intellectual life. A man who spends twelve or 

 fourteen hours a day in the severest manual toU, is not likely to have much vigor 

 left for anything else. He will think only of his supper and his bed as he goes 

 wearily to his home at night. Nathaniel Hawthorne in his diary kept when he 

 was a member of the community at Brook Farm, gives a very amusing descrip- 

 tion of the depressing effect of his unaccustomed manual labor upon his power 

 of mental production : "In the midst of toil," he says, "or after a hard day's work, 

 my soul absolutely refuses to be poured out on pajDer, It is my opinion that a 

 man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, just as well as under a 

 pile of money." "O labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with 

 it without becoming proportionably brutified." This of course is written in a 



