1574 
f Ih* RURAL. NEW-YORKER 
December 27, 102-4 
Reflec tions for the Year’s End 
lThe following notes were written as a personal let¬ 
ter, but they work in so well with the thoughts which 
come to many of our readers here, at the end of the 
year, that we have taken the liberty of printing them. 
Christmas and New Years will bring serious thoughts 
to many of our people, especially to those who live in 
the country, where men and women have time for real 
thought. It must be said that as years go by people of 
mature years have more and more things to pass in 
mental review, and the philosopher w r ho writes the fol¬ 
lowing will help to make this thinking clearer and more 
satisfying.] 
!8 11 IK FUTURE OF THE RADIO.—I’ve just 
been reading the last R. N.-Y., and one or 
two things in it make me think I’d like to 
write you a letter. The first thing I find 
is the radio page. None of us know what 
the radio is going to do for us. When I 
was in school 25 years ago our professor of physics 
rang a doorbell through a coherer energized by a 
spark from a Wimler static machine. Today many 
farmers can hear speech and music across a con¬ 
tinent. How that is going to draw people together! 
I see that one radio journal is discussing the use of 
Esperanto. What a vastly different idea we should 
have of far peoples if we could hear them talk of 
Physical foundations do not seem so difficult, but 
economic bedrock is pretty hard to find. The rush- 
light was a farmers’ product. Electricity might dis¬ 
place a township of tallow growers and produce 
more light in a night from their inundated land than 
animal fats therefrom could produce in a century. 
It seems as if food and clothing ought to be pretty 
stable; still the cottonseed competes with the hog, 
and a chemist with a basket of turnips is more or 
less a menace to the silk grower. I shouldn’t be at. 
all surprised to see a market for every bit of fibrous 
material to make lumber substitute. I have handled 
liber board made of cornstalks with enough rubber 
to bind and vulcanize that was apparently suitable 
for any use to which lumber could be put, and not 
subject to decay. I always thought the ax was the 
one tool to be saved in a case of general disaster— 
our most valuable tool. But assuming conditions 
which would make manufacture of that fiber prac¬ 
tical, the ax would go the way of the ox-yoke, and 
all the choppers would go to work in the factory. 
That has happened in the case of the auto and the 
horse. Many a farmer's boy who would he breaking 
try permanently. As I drive over the hills I see de¬ 
serted houses, and the wonder to me is that they 
are so few. With the leaf mold exhausted, the hard- 
pan comes up to the third wire on the fence. Life 
there must be dull and difficult. Better let such land 
lie idle. It cannot produce crops, and I doubt if it 
can produce men. I think it is a different proposi¬ 
tion from sending a pioneer into a country of great 
natural resources. Such a man may prosper, ma¬ 
terially and spiritually, and transmit to his sons his 
hardy qualities, but on exhausted lands I see no 
effort of environment or heredity to improve the 
race. 
THE SCHOOL QUESTION.—I like the articles on 
the school consolidation question. I believe in the 
country school for country children. It seems to me 
that the best of education comes from contact. The 
superintendent of our village union schools helped 
us eat up a turkey Thanksgiving Day. He says that 
there is too much tendency to leave education to the 
schools and take it out of the home. True enough, 
no doubt. But in many country homes there is very 
little that can be taught. The child should be drilled 
in mental gymnastics in school, and also there he 
should absorb some things not in the curriculum. 
That requires few enough children to each teacher. 
MILK PRICES.—1 appreciate your efforts to get 
better milk prices. The Dairymen’s League lias not 
done much for us. Some farmers seem well satis¬ 
fied, others kick like a government mule. Most of 
them feel that present prices are just enough to 
keep a few cattle on the farm to make manure for 
cash crops; beans, cabbage, peas, sweet corn. (Early 
cabbage sold for $1.50 a ton.) It looks to me as if 
our farmers ivere so efficient that almost any pro¬ 
duct can be turned off in superabundance as soon as 
the price shows a living wage. I am selling out my 
cows, and shall put the money into sheep; run more 
land into pasture, and see if our available labor will 
not pay in some higher-priced crops. Our grape roots 
grew well and are in good demand. Cauliflower 
does well here, and I think we could market it. As¬ 
paragus looks interesting; 35 hives of bees make a 
nice little side line. 
STINGING BEES.—Speaking of bees and their 
stinging black animals, I had a black horse injured 
a couple of years ago. I turned her out in the or¬ 
chard, and after a few days she ‘‘got down’’ about a 
hundred feet from the beehives. The bees attacked 
hex*, and so many left their stings in her nose and 
ears that instead of black they appeared to be gray 
their problems in a language we understood! If 
radio stays with us perhaps we shall see a common 
subsidiary language taught in all the schools of the 
world purely for radio purposes, the national lan¬ 
guage being retained for its literature and tradi¬ 
tions. I’m building a resistance coupled amplifier*, 
hoping to do away with feed back distortion of 
transformer coupling and to get loud speaker qual¬ 
ity. I sometimes listen of an evening to some far- 
flung concert, then go out on the porch and realize 
that thei*e are hundreds of concerts rushing past 
me of which I can perceive nothing. I look up at 
the stars and wonder. In all that firmament what 
else is there about me of which I know nothing? 
THE WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE.—And I 
wonder if my eyes and eai*s are aids or impediments 
to my seeing and hearing, or if I am only a little 
child learning his large print primer through the 
pictures on the page. I wonder if, when I lay aside 
my senses, I shall need any clumsyy contrivance of 
wires and batteries to hear distant music? I know 
a blind man who can see better than 1 can, and a 
deaf man who can hear things I cannot hear, and a 
mail with only one leg who goes swiftly and safely 
where I cx*eep and stumble. What do you think? 
ECONOMIC CHANGES.—The Hope Farmer has 
changed his roc-k on the hill for a chair by the open 
fire. There he tides to grasp the fundamentals. 
The Farm Watchman Salutes the Flay 
colts is now pounding his fingei*s to please Henry 
Ford. Some time when I have time I’m going to 
try to estimate the total horsepower that falls on 
our hills in the form of i*ain. and see how far it 
would go toward the cultivation of the valley lands: 
Our rainfall is about 30 in.; 1 cu. ft. of water equals 
02 lbs., so on top of a hill 400 ft. high every square 
foot would appear to accumulate 2.5 times 02 times 
400 equals 62,000 ft. lbs.; nearly two horsepower 
minutes. Maybe after the coal and oil are gone they 
will pound up the shale into cement and save the 
water on the hill tops. Who knows? It’s only a 
question of finding the labor. 
THE FUNDAMENTALS.—I used to think the old 
things would come back'because they were funda¬ 
mental. Now I am inclined to think that the funda¬ 
mental is progress. Old things go and never return. 
The really intelligent men ti*ust the future—to an 
extent. A man of the stone age might have thought 
a few flint arrow-heads would come handy if the 
new-fangled powder mill burned up, but as a matter 
of fact it never did burn up, and neither you nor I 
believe it ever had a chance to burn. Occasionally 
a piece of the i*oof blows off. Witness Russia of late 
—but as an institution the powder mill has never 
been succeeded by the arrow-maker. 
THE TIDE TO THE CITY.—It seems to me that 
the tide is turning toward the city from the eoxin- 
