Convention—Better and happier homes, 173 
very many that made me wish for pleasanter outward surroundings 
for our farmers’ homes. And why shall we not have them? Why 
do we not have them? I know very well the answer that would 
come from many a farmer; “ Oh, I have not the money nor the time 
to spend in adorning my house and yard,” and in many cases the 
additional remark would be made, “ And besides, I intend to sell 
out the first chance I get, and move somewhere else.” 
What constitutes a home? I know that this is a very indefinite 
queAion, and would receive an almost indefinite variety of answers, 
yet some farmers homes are about as follows: A miserable shell of 
a house, with not a tree nor a bush about it, — nothing to protect it 
from the burning svimmer sun, or the wintry blast. It has no 
pleasant yard or garden about it. No flowers bloom on the place, 
unless, perchance, they are struggling up with the weeds in the 
fields and along the fences. Perhaps the fields yield a fair harvest, 
and perhaps not. If the crops are good, the farmer accepts them as 
something he is fully entitled to have. If they, or the most of 
them fail, as they are apt to do, he quietly lays all the blame upon 
the bad season, which, by the way, is only a very impolite way of 
accusing Providence of not doing what, in a majority of cases, the 
man ought to have done himself in order to secure good crops. He 
is generally ignorant and indolent, and often selfish and self con¬ 
ceited. If you enter his house, it is homeless, cheerless and com¬ 
fortless. It is the place where he generally eats his meals and 
sleeps; a place where he spends his leisure hours, provided he has 
no other place to go. ,His wife goes her daily round of hard labor, 
cheerless, dispirited and discouraged. If she had ever looked for 
a nice and comfortable home in the future, she has long since given 
it up; and if she has hope or courage left, it is that her children 
may escape at least some of the hardships that have fallen to her 
lot. She rarely goes from home, and never upon an extended jour¬ 
ney. She sees almost nothing of the world, and knows but little 
more of it than she sees, as there are neither books nor papers pro¬ 
vided for her home, and hence she cannot read if she would. The 
children grow up with the idea instilled into them from infancy, 
that the farmer’s life is one of ceaseless toil, and that poorly paid, 
of comfortless homes, of an uneducated and uncultivated manhood, 
and premature old age. If they have the energy and spirit of true 
Americans, they are restless and uneasy, dissatisfied and discon- 
