Tbt RURAL NEW-YORKER 
681 
From the Other Side 
lie was my next-door neighbor, as farm¬ 
ers go; and a year ago when I ebook 
hands and wished him good luck it is no 
misstatement to say that my throat was 
tight and my voice was not quite as 
steady as a man would wish. Our goings 
and comings are never merely casual in 
the country, and when the boys left for 
France the day was indeed marked in our 
books and in our hearts. 
And now he was back. “Home from 
the wars”—that old phrase that never 
was meant for the new continent until 
this Spring. Back with the service rib¬ 
bon and the French Cross ou his jacket, 
and a golden wound chevron ou a sleeve. 
Went away a boy, and came back a man 
—as they all do. Tickled to get back, 
full of every little detail of home affairs, 
and yet talking to you with a somber look 
in his eyes, a sort of deep, inner knowl¬ 
edge as of a man before whom the great 
book of life has been opened wide. You 
see that look in the eyes of these boys 
who went through the mill in France. 
After two or three days . i had the 
chance for a good visit with him. \\ e sat 
by the fire and smoked and ate good Bald¬ 
win apples for an evening. 
“Tell me, John,” I said after a while, 
“something about the French farmers. 
What do you think about the country peo¬ 
ple over there? And what are the aver¬ 
age farm conditions?" 
“Well," he said, “the Frenchman makes 
a good farmer. That is, he is a conser¬ 
vative farmer; he plays the game with an 
eye to the future. Jacques thinks of his 
old age and of his children and of his 
grandchildren every time he fits a field 
for planting. He doesn’t exploit the soil 
because he can’t and get away with it. 
If he is a soil robber lie knows that he 
or his family will suffer later. For with 
them the farm is a permanent game. Not 
the moving and shuffling around in and 
out of farming over there.” 
“Pretty intensive thing, as a rule?” 
“Yes; what I saw; pretty intensive. 
Thirty to 40 acres to the farm, all under 
cultivation; potatoes, wheat, oats, hay, 
Hax. milk, fruit, and so on. Whole fam¬ 
ily work in the fields—old men. women, 
children. We think we know what farm 
work means here, but we don't. Perhaps 
our grandfathers, did. before the days of 
all kinds of machinery. Over there it's 
that same thing that our grandfathers 
knew; hand labor—work that depends 
ou outlay of human muscle for results. A 
very hard life, on the average.” 
“Old, old game, isn’t it?” 
“Yes.” answered John, gazing contem¬ 
platively at the fire. 
“An old, old game. The evidences of 
that are on every side. You realize directly 
that the farmer in Western Europe is a 
man moving in a long-worn groove. The 
system is old and settled and rigid. The 
French farmer, as a rule, lives on land 
that his forefathers were farming when 
Columbus was trying to raise capital for 
a voyage west. He works the way he 
does, saves the way he does, fights the 
way he does, because an ironclad system 
of things for a thousand years has taught 
him that no other way can survive. From 
the days of the cradle it has been instilled 
into him that he will have to -fight for 
his life straight through to the grave. 
Too many people; too little land; too 
great a concentration of industry, and so 
on. Makes farming and everything else 
a sink-or-swim proposition every minute. 
Fairly takes your breath to watch those 
people work. An average American farm¬ 
er woould have to go some to hold his own 
the way they do things in France.” 
“But they get results, don’t they?” 
“Yes. they get results. But it’s at a 
tremendous cost in human energy. In 
France probably one man feeds three. 
Here one man feeds about four, as popu¬ 
lation runs in general. Here we do every¬ 
thing with the idea of conserving man 
labor; land we have plenty of. 
“Over there they do everything with 
the idea of conserving land—men are a 
good deal more plentiful and cheaper than 
land. They get big yields per acre. Last 
October where I was billeted, in Western 
Finisterre, they turned out 400 bushels 
of potatoes to the acre. And oats went 
00 bushels, wheat 00 bushels, and so on. 
I saw hay in midsummer that I know 
would cut close to four tons to the acre. 
Big yields, tremendous yields in some 
places. But all harvested by hand—hand 
labor, every bit of it. I saw a few Yan- 
kee reapers, but grain all thrashed by 
hand. Beans same way. Potatoes dug 
out with old wooden hooks—and they 
were in level, fine soil where an American 
potato digger would walk through and 
throw them off by the bagful! Women 
and children in the fields from sunrise to 
sunset. Of course it was war. But 
those people were doing work they were 
used to—same thing they’d been doing all 
their lives. 
“The peasant homes show the same old 
fight for life. Everything saved, pinched, 
grubbed out to the last notch. Cows, pigs, 
chickens, all kept and coddled and watched 
over like the family. Kept almost in the 
house—stables always tacked on the rear, 
closer even than our New England sta¬ 
bles. Stock tended like children; loss of 
a pig a historic family tragedy. And ma¬ 
nure! Sometime we’re going to under¬ 
stand the value of stable manure. You 
ought to watch those French women 
scrape it up in buckets and pile it out in 
the front yard to be composted. Every 
scrap saved, and the stable washed, and 
the wash-water saved! Great sight to 
walk down the street of one of those little 
peasant villages and see the steaming ma¬ 
nure piles in every front yard. Great 
smell, too! 
“Thrift, that’s the word. Thrift carried 
to the last ultimate possibility. Whv. you 
and I were brought up in thrifty families; 
but, honestly, it made me feel like a life¬ 
long prodigal to see that game in Central 
France. Everything intensified by the 
war. of courses but only intensified, not 
different. The. evidence is everywhere 
that what they were doing last year they 
have been doing in the main for five cen¬ 
turies. An old, old system ; a hard one; 
a rigid, ironclad one.” 
“But the French peasant as a type— 
isn’t he a pretty upstanding sort? We’ve 
always heard that the peasant stock—the 
small farm owners—were the backbone ot 
France.” 
John did not answer for a moment. 
With hands clasped behind his head he 
gazed upward, his eyes somber and re¬ 
flective. 
“Yes.” he said slowly, “an upstanding, 
virile type. And that doesn’t express it. 
He is really wonderful—marvelous! Lit¬ 
erally the backbone.” 
Again he paused for a moment. 
“Yes. my hat is off to them. They 
know how to fight, on the farm or in* the 
trench. They've been trained in a long, 
hard, harsh school. It's a fight all the 
time they live—and no more chance for 
weaklings than there is in a thicket of 
young pine trees. 
“It’s a little pathetic to me, who never 
saw Europe before. I never understood 
anything about conditions over there; the 
magazines have always held up the 
French and German farmers to us as 
models—because they grew so much more 
food per acre. The blood and muscle that 
those people have to put into it never 
figured much in the magazine stories. 
But after America, to see the way they 
do it over there! It sort of takes your 
breath away to see what agriculture 
means in the old countries, where things 
have settled into grooves after centuries 
and centuries of increasing population and 
intensity of living. It’s a hard, stern 
game. I tell you, and a case of ‘devil take 
the hindmost.’ 
“The greatness of America,” he said, 
musingly. “It’s«beeu like a gigantic ser¬ 
mon to me. and to a great many thousand 
other boys. This year in Europe has 
taught us a little of what it means to be 
an American. To belong to a country 
where land, and resources, and wealth, 
and opportunity, lie open to a man for 
the taking! I don’t wonder any more at 
the tide of immigrants from the old world 
All I wonder is how any ‘fatherland’ or 
‘motherland’ can hope to retain any affec¬ 
tions of men who have once settled in this 
country and found out what it means 
and is. 
“The greatness of America — that's 
what it all sums down to, especially our 
fundamental greatness: land. My hat is 
off to those farmers over in France, but I 
have to pity 'em in the same breath.” 
A. B. GENUNG. 
The One-horse Farm 
I notice the inquiry of S. II. D.. page 
564. and your invitation to have those 
who farm with one horse tell how they 
manage. For the past 14 years I have 
carried on my farm with one horse. On 
an average I have planted one acre each 
of potatoes and corn and one-half acre of 
gardeu stuff; have sown perhaps three 
acres of grain, have cut 115 tons hay; my 
income has been derived mostly from the 
sale of cream from about eight cows, and 
the eggs from 340 hens; also have an or¬ 
chard of 100 trees. 
One 1,200-lb., horse jvill easily pull a 
one-horse mower of any standard make. 
In mowing a man has to take advantage 
of the lay of the land and perhaps walk 
where the grade is up hill : there is no 
trouble in mowing two acres in three 
hours, about half as much as a two-horse 
mower. One horse can pull a one-horse 
harrow and do half as much work as a 
two-horse team. The only work that one 
horse cannot do is breaking up the green 
sward. I always hire or change work 
with a neighbor to get this done. It also 
will pay to hire a two-horse team, if con¬ 
venient, to disk the furrows once. With 
a light spike-tooth smoothing harrow one 
horse will easily finish the job on land to 
be sowed. If you cannot hire, one horse 
will do the job in time with the one-horse ' 
spring-tooth harrow. It costs $150 to 
keep a horse one year, and the question to 
decide is. can one do enough more work 
on a small farm to make two horses pay? 
In my own case my time is mostly occu¬ 
pied caring for cattle and poultry, and 
work on the land is of secondary impor¬ 
tance. I have not over seven hours a 
day to work in the field, but if a man 
plans to put in 10 or 12 hours in field, as 
most farmers do who raise potatoes and 
oats for sale, a good two-horse team is 
best. One horse will mow all one man 
and a boy can care for. w. 
Massachusetts. 
U 
two horses” from town? 
HAT do you mean by 
'two horses front town’?” 
you ask. 
We mean: Is yours a “two- 
horse road” like the one shown on 
the left—full of mud, ruts, holes 
and bumps? 
Or have you a firm, smooth road 
—mudless, rutless and dustless— 
like the one shown on the right, 
that one horse can roll a load over 
with ease ? 
You know, of course, that the 
one-horse road is much cheaper. 
“How do you make that out?’' 
you ask. 
( It isn’t theory. It’s a proved 
I fact. We don’t ask you to take 
our word for it. Read the report 
of an authority, Mr. C. H. Claudy, 
recently published in The Country¬ 
side Magazine: 
“Statistics for a certain bad- 
road district showed the average 
cost for hauling to be 29 cents per 
ton-mile. This is more than it costs 
to ship a ton of farm produce 
from New York to Liverpool 
under normal political conditions.” 
“Yes; but I use an automobile.” 
All the more reason for a good 
road. Bad roads ruin automobiles. 
Good roads not only save wear 
and tear on autos but they move 
your farm half-way to town by 
cutting running time in two. 
“Yes; but how about the bond 
issue boosting my taxes?” 
Mr. Claudy discusses that, too: 
“The argument of the man who 
has to pay for the road is that he 
can t afford the bond issue because 
it increases his taxes. . . . But fig¬ 
ures knock an argument like this 
completely out of the ring. In a 
county where the proceeds of a 
$125,000 bond issue had been ex¬ 
pended on roads, the average cost 
of hauling per ton-mile was cut 
exactly in half, that is, from 30 to 
15 cents. T he actual saving in one 
year was $i2qgjo or within $30 
of an amount sufficient to retire 
the entire bond issue in one year!” 
“I know; but think of the main¬ 
tenance cost of macadam roads!” 
You are quite right in objecting 
to paying for the everlasting main¬ 
tenance cost of plain macadam. 
That is where Tarvia comes to 
your rescue. The use of Tarvia 
re-enforces the road surface and 
makes it water-proof, frost-proof, 
mudless, dustless and automobile- 
proof. A Tarvia Road costs very 
little to maintain and pays for it¬ 
self over and over again. 
Many townships—whole coun¬ 
ties, in fact—have proved this so 
thoroughly that they now use 
Tarvia on all their main roads to 
save money. 
In the face of these facts can 
you and your neighbors afford to 
use a “two-horse road” a single 
season longer? 
Illustrated booklet showing 
Tarvia roads all over the country 
free on request. 
Special Service Department 
In order to bring the facts be¬ 
fore taxpayers as well as road 
authorities. The Barrett Company 
has organized a Special Service 
Department, which keeps up to the 
minute on all road problems. 
If you will write to the nearest 
office regarding road conditions or 
problems in your vicinity, the mat¬ 
ter will have the prompt attention 
of experienced’ engineers. 
This service is free for the asking. 
If you want better roads and 
lower taxes, this Department can 
greatly assist you. 
Preseri/es Roads-Prei/ents Dust 
New York Chicago Philadelphia 
Detroit New Orleans Birmingham 
Seattle Peoria Atlanta Duluth 
Boston 
Kansas City 
Milwaukee 
Company 
St. Louis Cleveland Cincinnati Pittsburgh 
Minneapolis Dallas Nashville Salt l.ake City 
Bangor Washington Johnstown Lebanon 
Youngstown Toledo Columbus Richmond l.atrohe ' Bethlehent Elisabeth Buffalo Baltimore 
THE BARRETT COMPANY. Limited- 
St. John. N. B. 
Montreal 
Halifax. V S. 
Toronto 
Winnipeg 
Sydney. N. S. 
Vancouver 
