“The trouble with you folks is that you don’t know how to do team work,” said my city friend. “Suppose there are twelve million farmers in the country. Suppose they all joined and organized and pledged by all they hold sacred to each put up $5.00 every month as a working fund. Suppose they hired the greatest organizing brain in the country and instructed its owner and carrier to go to it. It would simply mean world control by the most patient and deserving class on earth. Why don’t you do it?”
That’s the way your city business man talks, and he cannot understand why our farmers do not carry out the plan. Of course that word “suppose” takes the bottom out of most facts, but it is hard for the business man to realize why farmers have not been able to do full team work. This man said that large business enterprises in the city were controlled by boards of directors. There might be men on the board who personally hated each other with all the of business . Yet when it came to a matter of business policy for the company they all got together and put the proposition through. He said it was different with a farmer, who if he had trouble with his neighbor over a line fence would not under any circumstances vote for him even if he stood for a sound business proposition.
That is the way many of these city men feel. It is largely a matter of ignorance through not understanding country conditions. Those of us who spend our lives among the hills can readily understand why it is hard for a farmer to surrender a large share of his individuality and put it into the contribution box of society. Many of us, I fear, would or cheat the contribution box in church unless we felt we were under the eye of our wives. Possibly we shall contribute more freely to society now that our wives and daughters have the privilege of voting. When a man has lived his life among brick and stone with ancestors who have been constantly warned to “keep off the grass” he comes to be of understanding what is probably the greatest problem of American society. That is the effort to keep our country people and feeling that they are getting a fair share of life, so that they will continue cheerfully to feed and clothe the world. You cannot convince a man unless you can understand his language or read his thought. One of the worst misfortunes of the present day is the fact that city and country have grown apart, so that they have no common language.
Those of us who live close to Nature realize that in order to know the truth we must find
“Tongues in trees, Books in running ,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
The trouble with the city man is that he has been denied the blessed privilege of studying that way. Therefore, if you would make him know why in the past it has been so difficult for farmers to organize you must go to the primary of life and not to the high school.
When our first brood of children were small, I thought it well to give them an early lesson in organization. There were four children, and as Spring came upon us there was a great desire to start a garden. So we proceeded in the most orderly manner to organize the Hope Farm Garden Association. We had a constitution and full set of rules and by-laws. These stated the full duties of all the officers, but somehow we forgot to provide for the plain . The largest boy was President and the smaller boy was Vice-President. My little girl was Secretary, and the other girl . It was an ideal arrangement, for each one held an important office, and all were directors. I had a piece of land and harrowed. I bought seeds and tools and the Association voted to start the garden at once. They started under directions of the President and I went up the hill to work in the . It proved to be a case where the controlling director should have remained on the job. up the hill I glanced back and saw the Hope Farm Garden Association headed for the rocks. The President and Vice-President were fighting and the Treasurer and Secretary were crying. No one was working except the black hen, and she was eating up the seeds.
I came back to save the Association if possible and the Secretary ran to meet me with the minutes of the meeting on her cheeks. Her hands had been in the soil and she had succeeded in transferring a portion of it to her face. Through this deposit the tears had forced their way in a track as as the course of the Delaware River, in its effort to carve the outline of a human face on the western coast of New . The poor little Secretary came up the lane with the old industrial cry which has come down to us out of the ages, tearing apart the efforts of men to combine and improve their condition.
“Oh! Father, don’t the President have to work?”
The minutes of the meeting clearly revealed the trouble. It seemed that the President of the Association made the broad claim that his duty consisted simply in being President. There was nothing in the constitution about his working. Of course, a President could not perform manual
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