268 POWER AND THE PLOW 



and crocks to be washed. It gives new speed to her sewing 

 machine. On sweeping day it saves her health and strength 

 with a vacuum cleaner. It runs her washing-machine and 

 mangle. Through a dynamo in the electric fan and the flat- 

 iron it brings her blessed relief from the fiery heat of the range 

 on ironing day. It is her ready helper in the kitchen. And 

 all this takes no account of the promise of new inventions. 

 The tractor dispenses with the raft of hired hands required 

 to care for and drive teams. With the elimination of this 

 constantly changing gang and the equally unreliable hired 

 girl necessary to cook and wash for it, the atmosphere of the 

 household grows purer, its tone higher. The farmer's wife 

 and daughter have time to indulge in those feminine touches 

 which make the home to enjoy pleasures which, added to 

 the naturally healthy environment, make life worth the living. 



The live farm boy realizes instinctively that this is a mechan- 

 ical age an age of power. He sees it in the autos whisking 

 by on the country roads, in the gasoline engine which dis- 

 places a neighbor's windmill, in the sputtering motorcycles 

 on which the city youth dashes madly about the streets. 

 The tractor appeals to his inborn sense of mechanics and fills 

 an aching void in his life. He yearns for the opportunity to 

 grasp it, to guide it, to see its cold metal parts transformed 

 under his direction into a living, throbbing mechanism to 

 see the familiar dirty lamp oil blossom into power for lifting 

 the weary burden of his hours of toil. This yearning gratified, 

 his bosom swells with the engineer's new pride of mastery over 

 the forces of nature. Only the farmer himself, often broken 

 and bent from his victory in the unequal struggle with the 

 soil, fails to enthuse over the new order of things. 



The tractor has its place on the corn belt farm, as surely 

 as in the great wheat belt. With the corn crop, the crisis 

 lies in the work of preparation. The harvest is not rushed. 

 The crop does not spoil easily. If it is not gathered in one 

 way it will be in another. Cultivating, which is still the almost 



