570 
The RURAL. NEW-YORKER 
March 29, 1919' 
HOPE FARM NOTES 
Part II. 
On the wall of our old living-room at 
home was a chromo entitled “Jriseph and 
His Brethren.” It was an \cfnl work 
of art. It showed a group of men putting 
a hoy down into a hole in Jthe ground, 
and as a work of art it would have made 
the head of the art department here weep 
in misery, and yet it affected me deeply. 
I used to stand and study it. with the 
result that at least one chapter of the 
Bible gave me great joy. and that was 
tin' story of Joseph and his brothers. 
That story helped to keep me sweet and 
hopeful on the frooty side of the barn, 
for 1 reasoned it all out as I worked. 
Here, I thought, was a farm boy. He 
did rather more than his share of living 
on‘the frosty side, and see what he came 
to. I used to picture Joseph in mind as 
he came walking over the desert carrying 
his father’s instructions about the sheep 
and the management of the farm. His 
brothers saw him coining, and they said 
among themselves, “Behold, this dreamei 
cometh.” You see, even in those days, 
practical men could not understand the 
value of a dreamer, poet or a thinker as 
the lirst aid to practical agriculture. I 
have no doubt that Joseph the dreamer 
often forgot to water the sheep. I have 
no doubt they got away from him when 
he was herding them, and so his brothers 
quickly got rid of him, and they sent him 
off to the place where they thought 
dreams never came true. And that is 
where they made their mistake, and the 
same mistake is often made in these days 
by other practical farmers, for dreams 
that are based on faith and pure ambition 
always come true. If Joseph had not 
been a dreamer, carrying the ideals of his 
childhood into Egypt, we can readily 
understand which side of the barn his 
brothers would have gone to when they 
appeared before him later, but Joseph was 
a man who remembered the dreams and 
the hopes of his childhood kindly, and he 
gave those brothers the sunniest side of 
the barn, and by doing so he made him¬ 
self one of the great men in history. 
You may surely take it from me that 
at some time in your life, if you prove 
worth the salt you have eaten, your State 
or your country will call you up before 
the judgment seat, and will say to you. 
“1 demand your life. In your youth 
you had ideals of manhood and of service. 
I have trained you and given you knowl¬ 
edge. I now demand your life as proof 
that your old ideals were true.’ 
That comes to all men not only on the 
battlefield, but in all -the humble walks 
0 f life—the farm, the factory, the shop, 
wherever men are put at labor, and it 
means a life given to service, the use 
of power and knowledge, in order that 
men less fortunate may live on the sunny 
side of the barn 
***** 
There is not a mar. or women here 
today, with gray in their hair, who will 
not be glad to tell you, if they will be en¬ 
tirely honest with themselves, that this 
call has surely come to them. They may 
not tell you how they met it, but it has 
come as a part of their lives. When it 
did come, and they seriously attempted to 
take stock of their service to the world, 
they ran upon a curious thing. They 
found that their material service, by 
which I mean their money, their wisdom, 
their power over others, were badly 
scorched in the lire of analysis. About 
all that will finally go through to the 
record will be the really unlifting things 
of education, which are the poetry, the 
imagination, and the joy of service. Prob¬ 
ably the hardest task for any person in 
thi,s audience today would be to write 
down on paper 10 absolutely unselfish 
things that he has ever done in his life. 
It would seem easy for a man or woman 
of 50 years to find 10 things of such up¬ 
lifting service that they never considered 
their own interest in doing them, and yet 
I think I may safely say that it would be 
hard for them to name these 10 things. 
We had something of an illustration of 
this when America entered the great war. 
Many of us felt honestly that our boys 
were not quite up to the standard. We 
thought they were a little lazv. or inef¬ 
ficient or spoiled, because they did not 
think as we did about labor and the neces¬ 
sity for work. We did not realize what 
the trouble was, and so we generally 
charged it to the influence of mother’s 
side of the family. We could not under¬ 
stand that by education, training and ex¬ 
ample, we had simply taught those boys 
only the material and selfish side of life. 
They demanded unconsciously more of 
the poetry and romance of life, and the 
war swept them away in a blaze of glory. 
We suddenly woke uu to find that under 
the inspiration of an unselfish desire, our 
lazy and careless boys had become the 
finest soldiers’ this world has ever seen. 
They were made so through the power of 
poetry and imagination, for “making the 
world safe for democracy” is only an¬ 
other name for making the great life ot- 
fering in order that helpless men and 
women may know the comfort and glory 
of living on the “sunny side of the barn.’ 
***** 
I think I have lived long enough and 
under conditions which fit me to know 
human nature better than most men know 
books. Our present improved man came 
from a savage. Originally man was a 
confirmed dweller on the frosty side of 
the barn. As human life has developed, 
the tendency has been for this man to 
run for a warm place on the sunny side. 
In order to get there, his natural ten¬ 
dency has been to crowd some weaker 
brother back into the frost. We may not 
like to admit it. but as we have crowded 
poetry and imagination and love out of 
agricultural education, we have lost track 
of the thought that there is one great 
duty we owe to society for the great 
educational machine she has given us. 
That one great life duty is to try to 
carry some more unfortunate brother 
out of the frost into the comfort of the 
sunny side of the barn. We art- too 
much in the habit of trying to leave this 
practical betterment to the Legislature or 
to the Federal Government, when it never 
can be done unless we do it ourselves, as 
a part of human sacrifice. Y’ou must re¬ 
member that in spite of all our scientific 
work, the world is still largely fed and 
clothed by the plain farmers, whose stock 
in trade is largely human nature and in¬ 
stinct. The shadow which undoubtedly 
lies over farming today is due to the fact 
that too many of these men and women 
feel that they are booked hopelessly to 
spend their lives on the frosty side of the 
barn. 
***** 
It. is in large part a mental trouble, a 
feeling of deep resentment, such as in a 
very much smaller way came to me as a 
little boy, for you will see how real and 
true are the ideals of childhood. The aim 
of this great college, standing here on 
the hills with the sunlight in its face, the 
great aim of all farm education, should In¬ 
to find some way of putting poetry and 
imagination into the hearts of the men 
and women who are now on the frosty 
side of the barn. There is more in this 
than any mere increase of food produc¬ 
tion, or increase of land values. A great 
industrial revolution is facing this na¬ 
tion. Such things have come before again 
and again. They were always threaten¬ 
ing. and every time they appeared strong 
men and women feared for the future of 
their country. Yet in times past these dark 
storms have always broken themselves 
against a solid wall of contented and pros¬ 
perous freeholders. They always disap¬ 
pear and turn into a gentle, reviving raiu 
when they strike the sunny side of the 
barn. That is where the errors and mis¬ 
takes of society are taken apart and re¬ 
made, better than ever before, by skilled 
and happy workmen. It. is on the frosty 
side of the barn, in the unhappy shadows, 
where men tear down and destroy without 
attempting to rebuild, for there can be no 
human progress except that which is 
finally built upon contentment and faith 
Men and women must be brought to^ the 
sunny side of the barn if this nation is to 
remain the land of opportunity, and such 
men and women as we have here must do 
the work. 
***** 
If you ask me liow this is to he done. 
I can only go back to childhood once more 
for an illustration. I know all the char¬ 
acters of the following little drama. We 
will call the children John, Mary and 
Bert. John and Mary were relatives of 
the old gentleman who owned the farm, 
and they came for a long visit. Bert was 
the farm boy, put out to work on that 
farm for his board and clothes, one of 
the thousands of war orphans who repre¬ 
sented a great legacy which the Civil War 
had left to this country. John and Mary 
were bright and petted and pampered 
You know how such smart city children 
can usually outshine and outbluff a farm 
boy. The woman of the house, a thrifty 
New England soul, decided that this was 
her chance to get the woodshed filled with 
dry wood, and so she put the three chil¬ 
dren at it. Before Bert knew what was 
going on, those city children had it all 
“organized.” Bert was to work on tin- 
frosty side of the barn where the wood- 
pile was, and lie was to saw and split 
all the wood. John played until Bert 
had split an armful, then John carried 
it about two rods to the shed, where 
Mary took it out of his arms and piled 
it inside. I have lived some years since 
that time, and I have seen many enter¬ 
prises come and go, and if that arrange¬ 
ment is not typical of thousands of cases 
which show the relation between farmer 
and middleman and handler, I have 
simply lived and observed in vain, and 
Bert represented the funner. 
***** 
And the distribution of the dollar re¬ 
ceived in exchange for that combination 
was still more typical. Now and then 
the woman would . think the woodshed 
was not filling very fast, so that some 
form of bribery to labor was necessary. 
She would then come out with half a pie. 
or a few cookies, to stimulate the work. 
Strange to say, the distribution of this 
prize was always given to the girl. She 
was doing that absolutely useless, work 
Of piling* the wood, and yet the pie and 
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