610 
‘Ihe RURAL NEW-YORKER 
April 5, 1919 
HOPE FARM NOTES 
Part III 
She certainly looked like a very stern 
picture of justice as she peered over her 
spectacles at the boy on the saw, and the 
three children were arraigned before her. 
“What shall I do with these children? 
I ehall never get this job done. I have 
spent nearly five pies on these children 
already, and see how little they have 
piled, and here they are fighting over it. 
I think the best thing I can do is to whip 
that lazy boy at the saw.” 
I wish you could have seen the face of 
the old minister as he rolled up his wrin¬ 
kles and prepared to answer. It. was worth 
a good deal to see how he looked out of the 
corner of his eye at the boy on the saw. 
“My good friend,” said he, “this is not 
a case for prayer or for punishment, or 
for investigation, or for education. It is 
a case for an adjustment of labor and pie. 
That boy on the saw has been doing prac¬ 
tically all of the work, and getting almost 
nothing of the reward. He is discour¬ 
aged, and I don’t blame him. You can¬ 
not crowd more work out of him with a 
stick. Move him out into the sun, give 
him the pie, and let him eat his share 
and distribute the rest. Make the other 
boy split, and carry and pile all that wood, 
and put that girl at washing windows. 
The closer you, put the pie up to the sau>- 
buck, the more wood you will have cut” 
Now tell me, you scientists and you 
wise men, if that does not tell the whole 
story. It is the pie of life, or the fair 
distribution of that pie, which leads men 
and women to the sunny side of the barn. 
What we need most of all in this country 
is some power like that of the old minis¬ 
ter, who can drive that thought home to 
human society, and it will not be driven 
home until our leaders and our teachers 
have in their hearts more of the poetry 
and the imagination which lead men and 
women to attempt the impossible and 
work it out. You will not agree with me 
when I say that in a majority of the 
farm homes today there is greater need 
of the gentle, humanizing influence of 
poetry and vision than of the harder and 
sterner influence of science and sharp 
business practice. As the years go on 
you will come to see that I am right. 
I know that, is one of the hardest 
things on earth for some of us to under¬ 
stand, for modern education has led us 
away from the thought. In our grasp 
for knowledge we have tried to substi¬ 
tute science entirely for sentiment, for¬ 
getting that the really essential things 
of life cannot stand close analysis, be¬ 
cause they are held together by faith. In 
reaching out after power we have tried 
too hard to imitate the shrewd scheming 
of the politician and the big interests. 
We have failed thus far because we have 
neglected too many of our natural wea¬ 
pons. Over 200 years ago Andrew 
Fletcher wrote: 
“I knew a very wise man that believed 
that if a man were permitted to make 
all the ballads, he need not care who 
should make the laws of a nation.” 
Andrew Fletcher’s wise man knew what 
he was talking about. Very likely some 
of you older people can remember the 
famous Hutchinson family in the days 
before the Civil War. I have seen the 
New Hampshire farmhouse where they 
were raised. It was just a group of plain 
farmers who travelled about the country 
singing simple little songs about freedom. 
That plain farm family did more to make 
the American people see the sin of slavery 
than all the statesmen New England 
could muster or all the laws she could 
make. There was little science and less 
art about their singing, but it was in the 
language of the common people and they 
understood it. 
‘“The ox bit his master; 
llow came that to pass? 
The ox heard his master say 
“All flesh is grass 1’ ” 
There came a crisis in the Civil War 
when soldier and statesman stood still 
wondering what to do next, for they were 
powerless without the spirit of the peo¬ 
ple. Then William Cullen Bryant wrote 
the great song in which he poured out tin' 
burning thought of the people : 
We’re coming, Father Abraham, 
Three hundred thousand more, 
From Mississipi’s winding stream 
And from New England’s shore. 
We leave our plows and workshops, 
Our wive and children dear, 
With hearts too full for utterance, 
But with a silent tear. 
We’re coming, we’re coming, the Union 
to restore: 
We’re coming, Father Abraham, three 
hundred thousand more! 
Had it not been for such songs and 
the spirit they aroused the Civil War 
never could have been won. We now 
understand that some two years ago the 
French army was at the point of mutiny, 
and was saved not by stern discipline 
but by a renewal of its spiritual power. 
I think it will be as hard as for a man 
to try and lift himself by his boot straps 
to try to put farming into its proper 
place through science and material pros¬ 
perity alone. We need poets to give us 
songs and playwrights to put our story 
in such pictures that the world must 
listen to it and understand. The one great 
thing which impels us to work on and 
fight is the hope that the property which 
we may leave behind us will be safe and 
put to reasonable use. Some of us may 
leave cash and lands; others can give the 
world only a family of children, but at 
heart our struggle is to see that this her¬ 
itage may be made safe. 
s|t * # * * 
For most of us make a great mistake 
in locating a storage place for the heritage 
which we hope to leave to the future. We 
work and we toil; we struggle to improve 
conditions; we strive to capitalize our 
worry and our work into money and into 
land in order that our children may carry 
on our work. Have you ever stopped to 
think who holds the future of all this? 
Many of you no doubt will say that the 
future of this great nation lies in the 
banks and vaults of the cities where 
money is piled up mountains high. We 
have all acted upon that principle too 
long, digging wealth from the soil and 
then sending it into the town for invest¬ 
ment, until we have come to think that 
out future lies there. We are wrong; it 
is a mistake. The future of this land, 
and all it means to us, lies in the hands 
of little children, -who are playing on the 
city streets or in the open fields of the 
country, and it is. not so much in their 
hands as in the pictures which are being 
printed on their little minds and souls. 
And this future will be safer with poetry 
and imagination than with the multipli¬ 
cation table alone. 
if # if $ * 
I know about this from my own start 
in life. I was expected to be satisfied 
with work until I was 21, and then have 
a suit of clothes and a yoke of oxen. One 
trouble with the farmers of New England 
was that they thought this a sufficient 
outfit for their boys. I think I might 
have fallen in with that plan and con¬ 
tented my life with it had it not been for 
a crude picture; which hung in the shop 
where we pegged shoes. It was a poor 
color scheme, a perfect daub of art. in 
which some amateur artist had tried to 
express a thought which was too large for 
his soul. A bare oak tree, with most of 
its branches gone, was framed against, the 
Winter sky. It was evening; a few stars 
had appeared, and the sky was full of 
color. The artist had tried to arrange the 
stars and the sky colors so that they rep¬ 
resented a crude American flag, with the 
oak tree serving as the staff. Ilis great 
unexpressed thought, was that at the close 
of the Civil War God had painted Ilis 
promise of freedom on the sky in tin 1 
coloring of that flag. As a child, that, 
crude picture became a part of my life. I 
have never been able to forget the glory 
of it, as I have forgotten the meanness, 
the poverty, the narrow blindness of our 
daily lives, so that all through the long 
and stormy years, wherever I have 
walked, I have seen that flag upon the 
sky, and I have waited hopefully for the 
coming of the sunrise of that day when, 
through the work of real education, when 
with the help of such men and such 
women as are here today, every hopeless 
man, every lonely woman, every melan¬ 
choly child upon a sad and desolate hill 
farm, may feel the thrill of opportunity, 
and the joy and the glory of living upon 
the sunny side of the barn. n. w. c. 
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