DRY-FARMING CONGRESS, WICHITA, 1914 



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saders as no old Crusader's zeal was ever fired. It is a vastly greater 

 task and vastly more worthy of accomplishment than any which the old 

 Crusader faced. 



We have, therefore, the opportunity for great achievement. Can we 

 give the young men and women also the comradeship which is, next to 

 the opportunity for achievement, the most important factor in sweetening 

 the outdoor life of hardship to which we are calling them ? They must 

 go in groups and colonies. We need a revival and readaptation of the 

 old New England method of settlement by colonies. Sometimes a preacher 

 would gather a congregation around himself and lead them out into the 

 wilderness and build up a little colony around his church. We no longer 

 have a wilderness where free land can be had, but, with less hardship 

 a colony could be started on land which would have to be purchased. It 

 would be necessary for the colony as a whole to work out the problem 

 of credit and farm finance. An organized rural life, whether it be of the 

 old New England type, or of some other type, will be necessary to give 

 the sense of comradeship in this great rural crusade. 



But what has this crusade to offer to the young men and women of 

 America? From the standpoint of the pigtrough philosophy of life it 

 has nothing to offer. They who- prefer the fleshpots of Egypt would bet- 

 ter stay in Egypt. Indoor work, freedom from responsibility, short hours, 

 time for carousal in rooms full of lurid oratory, beer, and tobacco, will 

 never be the lot of those who enlist for this productive campaign. But 

 from the standpoint of the workbench philosophy of life, it has the best 

 things in the world to offer. 



To young men it offers days of toil and nights of study. It offers 

 frugal fare and plain clothes. It offers lean bodies, hard muscles, horny 

 hands, or furrowed brows. It offers wholesome recreation to the extent nec- 

 essary to maintain the highest efficiency. It offers the burden of bringing 

 up large families and training them in the productive life. It offers the 

 obligation of using all wealth as tools and not as a means of self-gratifica- 

 tion. It does not offer the insult of a life of ease, of aesthetic enjoyment, 

 of graceful consumption, of emotional ecstacy. It offers instead the joy of 

 productive achievement and of noble comradeship in the productive life. 



To young women also it offers toil, study, frugal fare, and plain 

 clothes, such as befit those those who are honored with a great and dif- 

 ficult task. It offers also the pains, the burdens, and responsibilities of 

 motherhood. It offers also the obligation of perpetuating in succeeding 

 generations the principles of the productive life made manifest in them- 

 selves. It does not offer the insult of a life of pride and vanity. It offers 

 the joy of achievement, of self-expression, not alone in dead marble and 

 canvas, but also in the plastic lives of children to be shaped and moulded 

 into those ideal forms of mind and heart which their dreams have pictured. 

 To them also it opens up the joy of productive achievement and the noble 

 comradeship of the productive life. 



This does not mean that there are no possibilities of material reward 



