130 RURAL LIFE IN CANADA 



tion a young Spencerville farmer whose father by the 

 purchase of several farms had replaced thirty-eight per- 

 sons by eight. Recently this young man told me of the 

 decision to rent the farm, giving as the chief reason 

 that his mother and sister were practically attendants 

 upon the hired men. The home, which has everything 

 desirable that country life can afford, is maintained, 

 but the barns and fields are in the hands of renters ; 

 and the city claims another of that type which gives 

 us nation-builders. 



The result of conditions of labor on the farm is that 

 there is little of that joy and pride in one's work which 

 is essential to all true living. Our people need not only 

 to sing with our poet Anderson of to-day: 



There is no land like our land, 



The sea calls to the sea; 

 The mother that hath borne us 



Hath a daughter fair as she. 



O this may love the kopje, 



And that the blue-gum tree, 

 But this land is our land, 



And Canada for me!* 



but to sing in the spirit of our poet Sangster, writing 

 just before our modern day began : 



A song, a song for the good old flail 

 That our fathers used before us; 

 A song for the flail, and the faces hale 

 Of the queenly dames that bore us! 

 We are old Nature's peers, 

 His royal cavaliers; 



Knights of the plough! For no Golden Fleece we sail; 

 We're princes in our own right, our sceptre is the flail !f 



* R. S. G. Anderson, in " The Westminster." 



t Charles Sangster, Cantata, " The Happy Harvesters." 



