FARM LABOR 



71 



doctors, and other professional people, while rated at hav- 

 ing a better income than farm hands, are under much 

 heavier expense. In addition to his regular wages, a 

 married farm hand is usually allowed the use of a little 



FARM LABOR. 

 The employer and the "hired man." 



land for the growing of vegetables, and this materially 

 reduces the cost of supporting his family. 



Drudgery on the farm, too, is rapidly passing. 1 Much 

 hard work is now performed by machinery. The farm 

 laborer is becoming a machinist. From the preparation of 



" I emphatically deny the common notion that the farm boy's life is drudg- 

 ery. Much of the work is laborious, and this it shares with all work that is 

 productive ; for the easier the job, the less it is worth doing. But every piece 

 of farm work is also an attempt to solve a problem, and, therefore, it should 

 have its intellectual interest ; and the problems are as many as the hours of 

 the day and as varied as the face of nature. It needs but the informing of the 

 mind and the quickening of the imagination to raise any constructive work 

 above the level of drudgery. It js not mere dull work to follow the plow, I 

 have followed it day after day, if one is conscious of all the myriad forces 

 set at work by the breaking of the furrow ; and there is always a landscape, 

 the free fields, the clean soil, the rain, the promise of crops. Of all men's 



