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 The Fairview idea; a story of the new rur 
 
 3 1924 014 517 795 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014517795 
 
THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
Copyright 1919 
 The Bobbs- Merrill Company 
 
 PRESS or 
 
 BRAUNWORTH It CO. 
 
 BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
 
 BROOKLVN, N. Y. 
 
Restoring Our Rural Morale 
 
 In the month of August, 1914, war became the chief 
 occupation of the whole world. No one can even con- 
 jecture as to the length of the time which must elapse 
 before average humanity will be able to see world 
 affairs in the pure white light of peace. Things which 
 preceded the World War will be reconsidered in the 
 dull baleful glow which preceded the explosion; and 
 all matters following its conclusion will be looked at 
 in the light of its immeasurable effects. In this book 
 all consideration of the war is purposely excluded ; for 
 it relates to the inner life of the rural community which 
 must go on wholesomely forever if our nation is to be 
 equal to the responsibilities of either peace or war. 
 And yet the Great War changed radically our manner 
 of looking at agricultural problems. 
 
 After we engaged in the conflict we suddenly be- 
 came more concerned about farms and farming, if not 
 better informed or more intelligent. Prior to that 
 time the farm was regarded by most Americans as a 
 place to leave for the town ; by a few of us as a thing to 
 which it would be a fine thing to return after living the 
 real life of the city; by millions as an institution to 
 which they were condemned by some mysterious Court 
 of Last Resort for a life of more or less solitary con- 
 finement at hard labor; and by almost all of us as a 
 great underlying, all-supporting Foundation of Na- 
 
RESTORING OUR RURAL MORALE 
 
 tional Life, which had always existed, would alwiays 
 exist, and to which very little attention need be paid. 
 Food, shelter and clothing for all of us and for much 
 of the rest of the world had always come from the 
 American farm as the rain falls from heaven, by the 
 natural process of nature, descending upon the just 
 and the unjust alike. Always looking carefully after 
 her purse, the nation has neglected her scrip ; and ex- 
 pected to be fed as casually as does the Colombian 
 peasant who pulls from the nearest plantain tree the 
 bread of each meal. The contrast between America 
 and China was, and fortunately still is, best illustrated 
 by the fact that while the average conversation of the 
 American is, or at least used to be, about almost every- 
 thing else, five^sixths of the talk of the average poor 
 Chinese relates to the subject of food. 
 
 Then we engaged in war. Not in an ordinary war; 
 but the bitterest crisis which has occurred in the world's 
 history. One has often wondered at the thoughts 
 which must have passed through the minds of a philo- 
 sophical Roman when there broke on the frontiers of 
 his Empire those waves of conquest and carnage, 
 which, set in motion by obscure convulsions in the re- 
 mote and unknown regions of Asia, hurled people 
 against people, set in motion innumerable strange and 
 ferocious hosts, crushed peaceful populations, oblit- 
 erated cities, and propelled against the defenders of 
 Greece, Rome and Byzantium one wave of war after 
 another, until at last the old civilizations fell whelmed 
 
RESTORING OUR RURAL MORALE 
 
 in the rising, leveling, degrading onrush of barbarism. 
 But we have seen a stranger and more horrible thing. 
 We have seen the storm gather within our sight. We 
 have seen our own civilization turn and rend herself. 
 Not in some remote, unmapped region did this tempest 
 arise, but in the very center of the life we know; and 
 when it came, it assailed the worid in guises more ter- 
 rible than that which it assumed under Genseric, Attila, 
 Alaric, or Genghiz Khan. 
 
 War came as of old; but war made more horrible 
 through the plans and specifications of science. 
 
 Pestilence came as of old; but pestilence held back 
 by sanitation imtil it had eaten away the last bulwarks 
 against it. 
 
 Famine came as of old, but famine tabulated, blue- 
 printed, regulated, assigned, and codified in statutes 
 of vitamines and calories. 
 
 Famine came, not alone to the regions overrun by 
 the warring hosts, but to almost all the world. Only 
 some of those regions which lie outside the drainage- 
 basins of railway and steamship escaped the suck of 
 the famished nations for food. 
 
 This is the ultimate wonder of the war. If Marcus 
 Aurelius, who wrote his Meditations amid the tumults 
 of camps of Roman legionaries on the Danube or the 
 Euphrates, speculated and wondered at the causes 
 which unsheathed against Rome the swords of the rude 
 peoples beyond the Alps or fiMed the air with showers 
 of Parthian arrows, he could, at least, regard the foe 
 
ItESTORING OUR RURAL MORALE 
 
 as something outside the pale of his own civilization, 
 and meet the storm of barbarians as a thing alien to 
 himself like a storm of hail ; but the philosopher of to- 
 day must see in the present war a thing interne- 
 cine. It is our own civilization which brings it forth : 
 the civilization which we have learned proudly to speak 
 of as Caucasian. It fills the world with problems, the 
 like of which has never before been faced. The world 
 still trembles with the shock of the fall of Rome ; but 
 was that great cataclysm as tremendous as this? We 
 have been walking in what we thought was light and 
 out of it comes this eclipse of the great Illumination 
 which we fondly thought was to burn forever, or imtil 
 it might perhaps be put out by some extinguishment 
 from outside. "If, therefore, the light that is in thee 
 be darkness, how great is that darkness." 
 
 Nothing is ever to be again as it was; and among 
 the things that must be re-examined and reconsidered is 
 the matter of rural life in the United States. Suddenly, 
 before we knew it, the famine of the world came upon 
 us — ^not with pallid skeletons lining our roadsides, and 
 riots of hungry people in our streets — at least not as yet 
 — but with indubitable scarcity, exhibited first in 
 prices so high that the poorest of our poor could not 
 buy the necessities of life, and latterly in actual short- 
 ages of important articles of food, houses without 
 sugar or flour, a Food Administration urging upon us 
 essential economies, a general recognition of the fact 
 that the difference between us and the Chinese is les- 
 
RESTORING OXJR RURAL MORALE 
 
 sened by the fact that a greater and greater propor- 
 tion of our thoughts, too, are beginning to relate to 
 food, a universal agreement on the rising importance 
 of agriculture, its proper organization, and the better- 
 ment of rural conditions. 
 
 Shall we ever go back to the easy plenty of old? 
 Never, I think. The nation is overurbanized — and so 
 is the world. The mighty fabric of city, town and vil- 
 lage life is built on too small a foundation of crops, 
 fields, herds and gardens. It is not so much the foun- 
 dation which, in such a case, is endangered, as the 
 superstructure. We should regard it as an evidence of 
 national decay if there should set in a period of decline 
 among the least fortunately situated of our cities ; and 
 in this we should be correct. The overdeveloped thing 
 is the thing which decays first. Yet such decay must 
 surely come unless the agriculture of the United States 
 is placed upon a better basis. Great manufacturing 
 and trading cities can not persist when agriculture lan- 
 guishes ; for they are driven further and further afield 
 for agricultural support until they are brought within 
 the sweep of crushing competition, and finally lose 
 ground and collapse. The decay of New England's ag- 
 riculture sends her to the Mississippi Valley for food. 
 Her factory workers must pay in higher cost of living 
 the expense of thus foraging so far from home. Her 
 employers must pay the workers in higher wages, or im- 
 pose on them a lower standard of living — ^and in either 
 case the cities of New England suflfer in the greater 
 
RESTORING OUR RURAL, MORALE 
 
 and greater difficulty which they encounter in main- 
 taining themselves on their present plane of splendor 
 and magnificence. And New England is only one of 
 the first regions to feel the strain. Other districts fol- 
 low, until the genius of industrial efficiency finally com- 
 mits suicide by having so engrossed the energies of the 
 nation as to have enfeebled the vital processes upon 
 which the prosperity of industry rests. The hand has 
 been so active that the mouth has been forgotten. 
 
 In this book ,is offered after the outbreak of war a 
 survey of the problems of rural life in the United 
 States, made as if we were at peace. Whatever value 
 it may have possessed for peace times is believed to be 
 doubled during and after the war. If in the ancient 
 times before 1914 the country people found it desira- 
 ble to leave the farms and go to the cities, they find it 
 still more desirable now. If the loss of the young men 
 from the farms was a thing to be deplored then, how 
 much worse is it now when of those who remained 
 hundreds of thousands have been received into and 
 discharged from the army and navy, and the loss to the 
 farms may yet reach millions? If the industries of 
 the cities then tempted the country people from their 
 homes, what shall we say of the situation now, when 
 the .unskilled laborer in the city receives higher wages 
 than skilled artisans used to get? 
 
 The world has always despised and contemned the 
 farmer. Every durable tyranny in the world has been 
 founded as a matter of necessity on his subjugation. 
 
RESTORING OUR RURAL MORAI-E 
 
 Of tiie primitive industries which were in existence in 
 the ages when the institutions were established out 
 of which states grew, those only which concerned 
 themselves with the produce of the soil were suscepti- 
 ble of any broad and comprehensive enslavement. One 
 hunter could not enslave another. Every fisherman 
 fished for himself. Piracy was able to enforce servi- 
 tude only within its own ranks. But the nomadic 
 stockman could and did entrust his accumulated cap- 
 ital in the form of animals to the care of slave labor, 
 and from him the evil extended until servitude was the 
 rule in all occupations. That democracy, for which 
 we are fighting, is merely the struggle of mankind to 
 shake off this servitude in all the multifarious forms 
 which it has assumed — a contest which now has taken 
 on the form of a death-struggle in the darkness 'twixt 
 the old system and the Word. 
 
 When a New Yorker or a Qiicagoan, or one of the 
 citizens of any town or city in the United States, wishes 
 to subject his fellows to the soft impeachment of lack 
 of smartness or intelligence, he is quite likely to call 
 him a farmer. This is pleasantry; but it follows a 
 tendency which inheres in the language as is shown by 
 the words "boor," which meant "farmer" before it 
 meant cad ; "carle," which once took in all peasants and 
 then came to mean a low fellow; "churl," which goes 
 from the soil to bad manners, like 'Tboor" ; "villain," 
 who was once a man who belonged to a farm or villa, 
 but now is any bad man; "yokel,", once a farmer, but 
 
RESTORING OUR RURAL MORALE 
 
 now a "hick"; "pagan," from "paganus," a country- 
 man ; "heathen," a dweller among the heaths. To call 
 a man on Forty-second Street a farmer is a soft im- 
 peachment, now ; but if farm life is not ameliorated it 
 may sometime become an actionable epithet, like "vil- 
 lain." It is no accident that any term which signifies 
 a farmer or farm laborer in one century is likely to 
 mean something despicable or ignorant or criminal 
 the next. It means that our problem of rural life is 
 as old as history; and that some at least of the factors 
 that have destroyed agriculture in the past are still a 
 part of the problem of building up a balanced society. 
 
 The American farmer has been perhaps the most in- 
 fluential agriculturist in the world. Under past condi- 
 tions he was, when he chose to be, the ruling class in 
 government; for he outnumbered all others. Land 
 was potentially free to all comers, and landlordism had 
 not appeared in America except in a form which made 
 it a well-recognized stepping-stone from tenantry to 
 independent farming. Now it has become an oppres- 
 sive force which is establishing in our midst a peas- 
 antry more hopeless than that of most of the countries 
 of Europe. 
 
 Fifty years ago the farmer boy who went to the city 
 and became successful and great was a tradition of 
 American literature. That tradition has almost dis- 
 appeared. Nearly fifty per cent, of our farms are 
 operated by tenants under a system which possesses 
 none of the ameliorations which grew out of and sur- 
 
RESTORING OUR RURAL MORALE 
 
 vived the feudal system of Europe; and probably far 
 more than half the farms of the country, if their values 
 be considered, are embraced in the landlord-and-tenant 
 system, since lands gravitate into the hands of the rich 
 as soon as they become too precious to be owned by the 
 poor. Not only are more than half the lands of the 
 country, value considered, operated by country people 
 who are working mainly for city people, but the ten- 
 dency which has brought about this condition is operat- 
 ing year by year with accelerating force. In Germany 
 the lands are owned by the farmers themselves, to a far 
 greater extent. The food of Germany in this war 
 is chiefly produced by farmers who own their own 
 lands and love the farms as their permanent and hered- 
 itary homes. Our chance of a speedy victory would 
 have been vastly increased if these conditions were re- 
 versed ; and our prospect for the quick recovery of our 
 industries and their permanent prosperity after the 
 war would be far brighter. 
 
 Why do so many farmers leave the farm as soon 
 as they become intelligent and progressive? Is it be- 
 cause of the inadequate returns to their industry? In 
 part it is; but not, I think, altogether so. The Ameri- 
 can farmer has become unfitted for a life which his- 
 torically enrolls the name by which he is called among 
 the terms of reproach. He knows where the best op- 
 portunities are to be found for himself and his chil- 
 dren, and he demands for his wife and children all 
 the conveniences, the "luxuries, the amusements, and 
 
RESTORING OUR RURAL MORALE 
 
 the privileges which are to be had anywhere — and 
 they demand them for themselves. These are not to 
 be found on the average American farm. 
 
 And yet, the life of the working farmer may be 
 made to yield more of the opportunities of intellectual 
 development, more of the things which enthrall and 
 absorb, than the life of the average city worker. A new 
 farm life is all that is required, a life the beginnings 
 of which are to be found in existence almost every- 
 where. Give to farmers these things — ^things which 
 are inherent in country life — ^and he will find himself 
 living a life from which neither he nor his family will 
 desire to escape. Such a life will even draw back to 
 the land myriads of country-minded people from the 
 cities. Such a life will build up our food supply, will 
 make the basis of our city life wholesome and stable, 
 will lay forever the ghost of famine which has come 
 again to haunt us, will tend to re-establish again a 
 proper proportion between urban and rural living in 
 this nation. But it will do more : it will give to rural 
 life that standing which it once had in America. It 
 will give to country children better educations than city 
 children can ever hope to have. It will make the coun- 
 try people proud of coimtry life. For it will set them 
 to the task of solving the most interesting and absorb- 
 ing problems of the world — ^problems upon which their 
 living depends. 
 
 People do not, because the rewards are meager, leave 
 occupations which give them the consciousness of liv- 
 
RESTORING OUR RURAL MORALE 
 
 ing intellectual lives; and that consciousness ought to 
 be present in the soul of every farmer in the land. It 
 will be always in his mind when he sees as he will one 
 day see that it takes a much abler man to be a success- 
 ful farmer than to be a successful banker or lawyer. 
 In the new days which will follow the war the making 
 of a career for an intellectual man on every farm will 
 be a thing well worthy of the attention of every so- 
 ciologist and statesman. It is for the purpose of di- 
 recting attention to such possibilities in farm life that 
 this book has been written. 
 
 Soldiers, if they fight well, must be proud and happy. 
 Our soldiers in France astonished the world by their 
 wonderful morale. The story is yet to be told of the 
 way in which this morale was kept up. This book is a 
 plea for a better morale in rural life. With a better 
 morale, our farmers will fight their battles to a victory 
 which will amaze the world as our soldiers amazed it 
 in France. In the absence of a better morale we face 
 a future of continuing rural decay. jj q 
 
 Federal Farm Loan Board. 
 Washington, D. C. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I Retiring from Fairview 
 
 II A Corn-Belt Pioneer — 1918 Model 
 
 III The Boys' Revolt in Fairview 
 
 IV The Romance of a Book-Farmer 
 V Fairview's New Hired Man . . 
 
 VI An Adventure in Backtothelandia 
 
 VII Sex Rebellion in Fairview 
 
 VIII The Fairview Girl Crop . 
 
 IX Tackling the Midgard Snake 
 
 X Uncle Sam in Fairview . . . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1 
 
 28 
 
 56 
 
 87 
 
 120 
 
 146 
 
 174 
 
 199 
 
 228 
 
 258 
 
THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
THE 
 FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 
 
 IF a stranger should come into the Fairview neigh- 
 borhood inquiring for the most eminent mossback 
 in the countryside, I suppose that Abner Dunham 
 would be pointed out to him. I am Abner Dunham. 
 None of the neighbors would call me a mossback to 
 my face, but the pointing out would be done all the 
 same. My old neighbor, John Ackerman, for instance, 
 would drive out to the farm, and presenting the stran- 
 ger to me would say : "Abner, here's a gentleman from 
 Chicago who wants to meet you." 
 
 I don't consider myself a mossback. My motto is : 
 
 Be not the first by whom the new is tried. 
 Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. 
 
 And I recognize the fact that it may be considered a 
 proof of mossbackism that I quote Alexander Pope as 
 his couplets appeared in the old reader I studied in the 
 district school — and from memory. And yet it is a 
 
 1 
 
2 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 good motto. I was not the first, by any means, to try 
 that new mode of locomotion, the automobile ; neither 
 the last to cast aside the horse and buggy. And yet it 
 was that very automobile episode that fastened on me 
 the copper-riveted title of the neighborhood mossback. 
 
 It was this way: I waited several years, so that 
 others might invest in the experimental cars of the era 
 of trying things out, and then I bought a good car, I 
 waited until I had sold a consignment of three car- 
 loads of fat steers and had the cash, and then I took 
 the car home with me. I suppose if I had mortgaged 
 the farm, or gone without a silo, or put off the build- 
 ing of the big bam for the sake of the car, I should 
 have won the name of being an up-to-date "feller" ; but 
 I didn't. I bought the car for cash, and I soon began 
 to like running it; but after a man has been driving 
 horses, and good horses, too, for thirty years every 
 day of his life, he has acquired certain nervous reflexes 
 which go with scooting through the country, and with 
 me one of those reflexes was the use of the whip. I 
 didn't feel as if I were driving unless I had a whip 
 within reach. It marred the enjoyment I was entitled 
 to from a pretty heavy investment, and so I had a whip- 
 socket put on the dash of the car and carried a whip 
 in it. 
 
 I was the butt of a good deal of good-natured fun, 
 and my family objected to the whip. When our pic- 
 ture appeared in a Chicago paper in the big touring car 
 with a whip in the socket, at about the time my young- 
 est son came home from the agricultural college, the 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 3 
 
 whip was taken off the equipage. I had got so I could 
 get along without it pretty comfortably anyhow. Peo- 
 ple didn't understand why I did it; but my reason for 
 the whip was a good one, quite personal to myself. In 
 proving me to be a mossback, however, that whip 
 affair is always the first bit of evidence introduced, 
 marked Exhibit A and made a part of the record. I 
 don't care. 
 
 Exhibit B is the fact that, though I have a section 
 of good land and plenty of money with which I could 
 build a home in the county seat and live on my rent 
 and interest, I still refuse to retire from the farm and 
 the Fairview neighborhood. I have good reasons for 
 that eccentric course too. 
 
 John Ackerman's father and mine drove into the 
 country together in 1857, and John and I were boys 
 together. Herman Lutz's father was a Hanoverian 
 immigrant who arrived with Herman and the rest of 
 the Lutzes — so far as they had arrived on the scene—' 
 a few years later. Herman wore wooden shoes to 
 school, and once John and I, finding that we couldn't 
 lick Herman, outran him. Whereupon he threw his 
 wooden shoes at us. We put stones in them and sunk 
 them in the swimming hole at the bend of the little 
 brook which ran so clear and pure through the prairie 
 grass then, and is such an uninteresting ditch with mud 
 banks now, with black corn ground on both sides. So, 
 you see, we knew each other pretty well. And Frank 
 and Bill Raymond and Al McAllister moved in; and 
 then quite suddenly, as it seems in looking back at it, 
 
4 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 the rest of the neighborhood filled in with the develop- 
 ment of the country, until we could no longer drive 
 kittering-ways across the prairie to town, but had to 
 follow the section, lines to keep off the crops, first a 
 part of the way and finally all the time. That marked 
 the period when the country was "settled up." 
 
 Nobody in those days had any thought of going to 
 town to live and becoming "retired farmers." We ex- 
 pected to be farmers all our lives. That's what we had 
 come west for. We could have moved to town back 
 east. 
 
 And now that the Fairview neighborhood has been 
 so radically changed by the process of the best and 
 most substantial families in it ceasing to be farmers 
 and becoming "retired" farmers, I think it may be 
 worth your while to look over the whole case and see 
 whether I am right, or John Ackerman and Herman 
 Lutz's folks — and the McAllisters and the Raymonds, 
 and the Smiths, Browns, Joneses and Robinsons of 
 Pleasant Valley District, and Lincoln Center and Pious 
 Ridge, and all the other rural communities of which I 
 have any knowledge. 
 
 We all worked hard before we got above farming, 
 and were proud of how much we could do. I guess it's 
 always that way in a new cotmtry — ^the very newness 
 of it seems to put energy into people. It may be it's 
 because only the strongest, and most venturesome are 
 willing to be pioneers, but I believe that when any man 
 gets up against raw nature, out where he can make no- 
 body hear when he calls for help, he's going to show 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 5 
 
 the besf there is inTiira — or the worst — ^and will prob- 
 ably find a good deal in himself of one kind or another 
 that he didn't know was there. And I don't believe it 
 brought out the worst as a rule. I am of a generation 
 skilled "to pitch new states as Old-World men pitch 
 tents." They have turned out in my time to be good 
 states, full of the spirit which will one of these days 
 make of all this nation a greater New England — full of 
 her mentality without her narrowness, and gifted with 
 the southern talent for graciousness and gallantry, and 
 the breadth of mind and freedom from political and 
 economic superstitions of the frontier. 
 
 We boys stayed on the newly established farms as 
 a matter of course. We had always expected to do so. 
 Somehow cities didn't attract country boys then as they 
 do now. Perhaps it was because they were farther 
 away, or harder to reach, or our disposition to drift 
 had not yet been developed. 
 
 We even had our farm songs, in which the beauties 
 of farm life were tunefully set forth. I remember one, 
 of which our girls used to sing the refrain, which ran : 
 "So a farmer's wife I'll be, I'll be, I'll be!" And an- 
 other in which it was declared : "One of these country 
 lasses is worth a score of your city girls." And I'll state 
 this right here : we shall never again have a healthy 
 rural life until we have back again the feeling that it 
 is the best life, and that the farm people are the best 
 people. I wish we could have that feeling back again, 
 and the crude, rude old songs, instead of "I Want 
 You, My Baby, I Do!" or "Stay Down Where You^ 
 
6 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 Belong." I want people to stay up where they belong 
 instead. But then, as I have said, I am the classic 
 raossback of our county. 
 
 If the boys of those days went away anywhere it 
 was farther west, where land was cheaper and oppor- 
 tunities seemed bigger. But for most of us the place 
 that we had selected for a home seemed about as good 
 as anything else and a good deal handier, and we acted 
 atcordingly. 
 
 Herman Lutz, for instance, married yoiing, as most 
 of our German immigrants did, and for a number of 
 years his wife worked with him in the field. While 
 the children were young Herman hired a girl to take 
 care of them, and Mrs. Lutz kept on doing a man's 
 work. She said she'd rather do that than the house- 
 work, and, considering the home, I really can't blame 
 her. Besides, if she had kept in the house they'd have 
 had to hire a man, and hired girls were cheaper than 
 hired men. When the children were big enough they 
 took their mother's place in the field and she took the 
 hired girl's place in the house. Nobody thought less of 
 her for this field work — ^that is, nobody in her circle 
 of friends. Among us Yankees the German habit of 
 working women in the fields was the sure mark of the 
 "Old Countryman." We didn't even allow our women 
 to milk the cows. The McAllisters were Hoosiers, and 
 among them the women "pailed" the cows as a matter 
 of course. Old Ebenezer McAllister used to say that 
 among the Injuns the women did all the work, among 
 the Hoosiers it was equally divided, and among the 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 7 
 
 Yankees the men did it all. Thus we were originally 
 divided into racial and sectional groups in the Fair- 
 view settlement and were not yet knit into a people. 
 Now we have all become one — Lutzes, McAllisters 
 and Ackermans have become one people. 
 
 None of them milk cows any more or work in the 
 field. The acres that once knew them know them no 
 more except as rack-renting landlords. They have be- 
 come Typical Americans, with the pavements instead 
 of the furrows under their feet. And I think a part 
 of this exodus of the farmers from the farms may be 
 accoimted for by Herman Lutz's domestic economy 
 for it truly was economy, and in a way domestic. 
 Herman certainly got more work done at less expense 
 than any of his neighbors, but, as my wife used to 
 say, his establishment was a factory, not a family. The 
 daughter, who was third in the order of arrival, came 
 nearer doing a man's work than any girl ought to. 
 Herman used to say she was the only one who could 
 drop com straight enough so it could be plowed both 
 ways when it came up. That was before people had 
 begun to use the wire check-rower planters very much, 
 and still laid off the ground with plank markers, and 
 dropped the com by pulling a lever as the horses drew 
 the planter across the marks. Kate could drop a field 
 of com as pretty as a checkerboard; but I guess Her- 
 man would have gladly plowed out every other hill in 
 his fields if he'd known what a mistake he was making 
 with his children. When I married my wife I told her 
 that if the time should come when we couldn't make 
 
8 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 a living without her working in the field we'd starve 
 together. We're both alive to-day, and I believe you'd 
 call us pretty well fed. Neither of my girls ever 
 worked in the field either. They've wanted to try it, 
 but the idea never appealed to me, I believe in divi- 
 sion of labor on the farm, and I'm just mossback 
 enough to think that women's work is round the house. 
 
 My wife picked up that last sheet and read it. 
 "Much you know about it," says she. "Many a day 
 when I've been nearly crazy with the loneliness and 
 monotony of housework it would have been a real 
 kindness to me if I could have gone out and raked 
 hay or driven the binder — out where the men were. 
 That's what women want and need — ^to work with 
 men." Well, I can't stop to reply to that now. Perhaps 
 none of us knows all about this matter of keeping the 
 folks on the farm. 
 
 As Herman's family grew up his prosperity grew 
 accordingly. He figured that boys and girls who went 
 to school in the winter might as well be of some use 
 to their parents in the rush season, and, besides, if they 
 worked less than fourteen hours a day they'd get lazy 
 and never be any good. Herman didn't suspect such a 
 thing; but it was by this very system of building up 
 a sheet anchor of property by which he meant to hold 
 the Lutz family to the farm that he was generating a 
 wind of discontent that would eventually sweep them 
 from their moorings in Fairview. All his children 
 were good workers, and •JtiaJiard to tell how much 
 they saved for him; but did tn^, ever see any of it^ 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 9 
 
 If they did, they never showed it. They always had 
 plenty to eat and enough clothing, such as it was, but 
 none of them had a bank-account. I could see that 
 the children felt their lack of good clothes when in 
 company; and Herman himself went round looking as 
 if two dollars would jingle in his pocket like a kick- 
 ing jackass in a tin stable. Anybody could see that his 
 daughter was a little inclined to think small of her 
 father. Economy is all right and work is good for 
 boys ; but they ought to be given some greater inter- 
 est in it than simply living from one day to the next. 
 
 By the time the oldest Lutz boy was of age Her- 
 man's farm was one of the best in the neighborhood. 
 The bams and feed yards and hog houses were as fine 
 and up-to-date as any I ever saw. He had two silos 
 that people came from the next county to see. His cat- 
 tle were the pride of the community, and he wouldn't 
 have an animal on the place that wasn't pedigreed. 
 But just when things looked at their best the two 
 oldest boys pulled up stakes and went to Chicago. Her- 
 man did his best to persuade them to stay with him 
 in his old age, but it was too late then. They had been 
 with him too long in his prime. 
 
 When they left he gave them some money and told 
 them he hoped they'd soon be back. Herman wasn't 
 consciously mean; not a bit of it; he was just illogical. 
 He was applying to a fifty-thousand-dollar estate the 
 logic of that boyhoo^ time when Herman and his fa- 
 ther used to shell the com fed to the stock — shell it 
 laboriously by hand — so as to save tlft cobs for fuel. 
 
10 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 We lose our boys and girls to the cities by thousands 
 by just such survivals of hardscrabble logic. 
 
 The boys weren't pikers by any means, and they 
 didn't come back as Herman expected they would. 
 That's the trouble — the boys don't come back. That's 
 why the settled farming districts in our best states are 
 losing farm population. The boys don't come back 
 when we old fathers drive them to town. 
 
 For tvv^o years Herman worked the place with young 
 Adolph and a succession of hired men. Then he rented 
 it and moved to town, and the glory began to depart 
 from the Israel of the Lutz farm. It was virgin 
 prairie when Herman first saw it,- so rich that its fer- 
 tility seemed endless. No German ever abuses the soil 
 — ^his own soil, I mean ; not the soil of his victims — 
 as some other people do, but, of course, there was some 
 soil robbery in the Lutz farming. There must be in 
 a new country. Herman, however, had steadily im- 
 proved the condition of his land since about 1890 — 
 which was the low point of fertility in many of our 
 farms about here. He adopted a rotation -then, and 
 when the farm was rented it was growing better wheat 
 and better corn than it did in 1857. When he rented 
 it he did what all American landlords do — ^he made a 
 year-by-year-lease, which amounts to a criminal con- 
 spiracy entered into between owner and tenant to rob 
 the land. And the farm shows it now — ^but I can't tell 
 you about that. It's another story. Yet under the cir- 
 cumstances I don't blame Herman for moving. Hired 
 men were har^ for him to get along with. After a 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 11 
 
 while he began hiring every hobo that applied, and 
 firing him as occasion arose, usually in about a week. 
 More than one hired with him Saturday night and left 
 before the cows were milked Monday morning. After 
 two years of this the place had already lost some of 
 its well-kept appearance, to say nothing of its earning 
 capacity. 
 
 I like to set forth the case of Herman Lutz with 
 some particularity — it is so typical of the town-going 
 family which after a quarter of a century of prosper- 
 ous industry is lost to rural life because of rising 
 standards of wealth and no standards at all of either 
 enjo)mient or culture. Another reason for his retiring 
 from the Fairview neighborhood was his wife's poor 
 health. Although Herman didn't realize it, years of 
 hard work had been too much for her — afield work, 
 housework, children and all. Every day she had car- 
 ried many buckets of water from the well, and if the 
 windmill didn't happen to be going she had pumped it 
 herself. Herman had built a concrete drinking tank for 
 the cattle; all they had to do was to come and drink 
 what they wanted. But for the woman who was his 
 partner in life he had provided nothing but an iron 
 pump handle and a gravel path. 
 
 As far as their house was concerned, it was a col- 
 lection of additions built round the old house reared 
 by Herman's father when he settled on the place. No 
 two rooms had the same floor level, and some of the 
 doors were so low that Herman had learned by long 
 experience to duck every time he went through them, 
 
12 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 He liad money enough to build the finest farmhouse 
 in the county; but he was so busy farming that he 
 hadn't the time to build a home in which he and his 
 family could be comfortable. A man does not feel the 
 need of a good house as much as a woman does; he 
 doesn't have to work in it. 
 
 Herman lives at the county seat now, and spends his 
 time talking with John Ackerman and the other retired 
 farmers there about the ungratefulness of sons and the 
 worthlessness of hobo help. I've made a study of these 
 former neighbors of mine, and of Herman and John 
 Ackerman's cases in particular. I run my car round 
 to his desirable residence almost every time I go to 
 town; and I think I know just about how much con- 
 venience Herman has found in city conveniences, and 
 pretty near what measure of comfort in tow:n com- 
 forts. 
 
 The history of his efforts to be happy is pathetic to 
 my mind. At first he tried to make his surroundings 
 as much like the farm as possible, but he found this 
 rather hard to do on a city lot. He hated to give up 
 his back-yard pigpen; those fat, friendly hogs were a 
 link that connected him with his old life. But when 
 his neighbors began to make it as unpleasant for him 
 as the pigs made it for them, he gave in, just in time 
 to escape being arrested for maintaining a nuisance, 
 and took up bee culture. Some of his fellow suburban- 
 ites kicked on the bees too, but Herman vowed he'd 
 law 'em to the Supreme Court before he would be dic- 
 tated to, and I guess bee law is with him. He still keeps 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 13 
 
 the bees and gets lots of pleasure out of them, but I'll 
 bet he gets lonesome for the cattle and the hogs and the 
 big Percherons of which he used to be so proud. 
 
 He is sending Adolph and the girl to the academy 
 at the county seat, and I'm sorry for them both. 
 Adolph doesn't seem to know what to make of his 
 classmates or of himself. He wants to be a hot little 
 sport like some of the boys he knows there, but he 
 isn't built that way. I've seen him standing on a cor- 
 ner with a bunch of them, watching the girls go by, 
 and he looked out of place and uncomfortable, uncer- 
 tain what he ought to do with his hands and unable 
 to think of any flip remarks such as the others were 
 so free with. Sometimes he gets a cigar and goes away 
 alone and smokes it, as a kind of sacred duty, I guess. 
 Adolph never can be a sport, but he has all the chances 
 ill the world to make a fool of himself, and that's what 
 the sports generally do after all. Only they do it with 
 a manner and style that in a mysterious way seem to 
 constitute some sort of compensation for the inevita- 
 ble losses incident to the business of being a sport. 
 
 The pity of it is that Adolph Lutz is handicapped 
 by the fact that, with all due allowance for the nar- 
 rowness of his farm life, he was started right. He was 
 a good country mouse. If he could have had half of 
 the privileges his father could have given him right on 
 the farm, with no expense that would have been per- 
 ceptible to the Lutz pocketbook, he would have been 
 a very good fair-to-middling citizen, and would have 
 turned off more good food for the nation than two of 
 
14 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 the shiftless tenants who eke out an, existence on the 
 Lutz acres. I don't see for my part what g(5od Adolph, 
 with the money he will one day possess and no knack 
 for cither spending it or using it, can do in town. 
 
 Herman's second son came home last week broke, 
 and got a job in a livery stable. The oldest is still in 
 Chicago, driving a dray. Both of these occupations are 
 honest, if not exalted. They demand in the city those 
 qualities of horsemanship and animal husbandry whicH 
 every farm boy learns as a part of his second nature. 
 Therefore they are the natural urban occupations for 
 such boys as these. But they don't constitute city suc- 
 cess. They are not' things to be exactly proud of. They 
 dp not mark an advance in the world from the busy, 
 respectable and increasingly profitable life on the old 
 Lutz farm. ^ family has started down the hill to a 
 status lower than the old peasanthood from which out 
 of Gerr^any the Lutzes emerged sixty years ago; and 
 half a section of magnificent land has started back to 
 a statqs of fertility lower than that of the days when 
 the buffalo grazed it. That isn't what I call conserva- 
 tion of the national resources — ^it is merely retiring 
 from Fairview. 
 
 _, So much for the Lutz experiment. Now let us see 
 about the experiences of some of the other neighbors — 
 John Ackerman's family, for instance. When John 
 Adce^tnan, a year later than the retirement of Her- 
 man'Lutz, moved to town, he left one of the best farms 
 in flie neighborhood. You wonder why I use the same 
 words to describe the places deserted by each of these 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 15 
 
 owners? It is -just because the owners of the best 
 farms are the very ones who can become retired, farm- 
 ers. Look ove'r any rural neighborhood in the United 
 States, and you will find the farms in the hands of 
 tenants just in proportion to their ability to svq)port 
 both a tenant and a family in town, living in whole 
 or in part on the rents. 
 
 I sometimes think that if our farms were not so rich 
 and productive hereabouts it would be better for all 
 hands; and I look forward with some disquietude of 
 spirit to the time when by neglect and soil robbery 
 these lands will cease to produce enough to give the 
 town-dweller returns that will make their ownership 
 desirable to him. By that time the migrating families 
 will be domesticated and wonted in the town, and 
 won't come back. The tenants will not be able to buy 
 the lands and build up the soil. I wonder if great pro- 
 prietors, possessing the ability and the capital to work 
 hired help and tenants on some system of making 
 profits from exhausted soils, by building them up or 
 by completing their robbery, will not develop and fill 
 the land with those great latifundia, as the Romans 
 called them, or great estates which, some Latin writer 
 says, ruined Rome. With a cheap enough kind of la- 
 bor, and tenants living on a low enough plane, I can 
 see how great fortunes might be made in fifty years 
 from now by such huge haciendados out of the com- 
 pletion of the ruin of the Corn-Belt States. 
 
 John Ackerman and his family, when he retired 
 from Fairview, left as good and comfortable a house 
 
16 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 as the one he bought in town. They moved for the 
 sake of the children, they said, and it was a perfectly 
 good reason. The children did need better educational 
 facilities than we then had in Fairview — ^though, ac- 
 cording to things some of the students and professors 
 in the colleges themselves say right out in print, the 
 value of a college education over just ordinary school- 
 ing is doubtful. The Ackerman children had absorbed 
 about all they could get from our rural school, and 
 they wanted to go on. And nowadays children seem 
 to think they must have the intellectual coddling of 
 instructors in high school and college if they are to 
 make mental progress. 
 
 John was glad they wanted to make something of 
 themselves, as he said, to distinguish what they were 
 to be from what he and I were. When I said they'd 
 be darned lucky if they made anything better of them- 
 selves in the town from what a lot of boys had become 
 on the black soil of Fairview, he said I was a moss- 
 back. 
 
 "Are any of them going to study agriculture, John?" 
 I asked. 
 
 "No," said he, "they all seem to be pretty well fed 
 up on agriculture on the farm. That's what they're all 
 running away from." 
 
 Running away from the very thing their grand- 
 fathers and grandmothers pierced forests, forded riv- 
 ers, dared Indians and wild animals, and bore tornado, 
 blizzard and drought, dearth and poverty, to seek»and 
 find! Strangest transformation of a people in two 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 17 
 
 generations ever seen, I guess ; and one in which future 
 historians will find some meaning, though we don't 
 seem to. 
 
 John was proud of his children, and his wife was 
 still prouder, and wanted to give them the best possible 
 chance. They thought the right way to do this was to 
 let each of them choose his life-work. When children 
 are too immature to choose their clothes or their food 
 we think them perfectly capable of selecting their 
 wives, husbands and occupations. Just why they are 
 supposed to possess exceptional wisdom along those 
 lines I never could see, yet perhaps it is all right. But 
 why did John Ackerman refuse or neglect in every 
 possible way to try making agriculture, as they call 
 farming in the college, attractive to his children? 
 
 They all knew well enough that it was moderately 
 profitable — ^their father had made his money by it. 
 John never was stingy with them either. But as for 
 handling the place, John did it himself and didn't dis- 
 cuss matters with anybody. He made a success of it, 
 but he let the children's imaginations get away from it. 
 
 Now to me there's more real romance in farming 
 than in an3rthing else I know about. Handling a farm 
 is a big thing, and it takes just as big a man to do it 
 as to handle any business proposition. The trouble 
 with the Ackerman boys was that they saw only the 
 details, and a good many of the details and daily jobs 
 are not very thrilling, and some of them are dirty. 
 Working day by day without a big idea behind you 
 gets monotonous, and that was the trouble with those 
 
18 THE FAIRVIEW IDE^ 
 
 boys. John felt the bigness of it, but I suppose it would 
 have embarrassed him to mention it. He assumed that 
 the boys couldn't help feeling it, and that's right where 
 he made his mistake. It's easy to see glamour in some- 
 thing far away; you can't see the little petty things 
 about it. But to see the romance of something near at 
 hand you must see through and over the little things ; 
 and that may be hard to do, especially if you've grown 
 up right among these same little things and had them to 
 contend with every day. — 
 
 My father experienced something like that back east 
 before he came to Fairview. He had been obliged to 
 contend so long with the brush and sprouts that threat-, 
 ened to overrun the fields that he had forgotten the 
 beauty of the trees. I've heard' him tell how glad he 
 was, when he' got here, to find that there was ;io clear- 
 ing to be done ; but ever since I can remember the old 
 trees have had their places about our old farmstead. 
 Father planted them and tended them until they were 
 established. He got lonesome without trees. They were 
 a part of his life, and in his old age they were like 
 comrades to him. 
 
 John Ackerman's boys began to talk as if they were 
 fated to feel like that about the farm. They are doing 
 fairly well' in town; but one of them told me the other 
 day, when he filled a tooth for me, that he'd like to be 
 back where the air is clean, the fields big, and a mile 
 is a mile and jiot fourteen blocks. John may come back 
 himself. I believe he would if it weren't for his wife 
 and daughter's. We have two back-to-the-landers — city 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 19 
 
 people who are re-learning the occupation their fore- 
 fathers deserted for the factory business^ — right in our 
 district ; and John told me the other day that it seemed 
 a little queer to him that good farmers are moving to 
 the city, where they are no good in the world, to leave 
 openings for city people who are no good on the farms. 
 
 I can't see myself how this helps out in making our 
 national life efficient. We manage all the time in such 
 a way as to have the greatest number of people in both 
 town and country who are greenhorns on their jobs 
 or who hate the life they are living. Thus we trade off 
 great masses of producers from places where they are 
 relatively efficient into places where they are relatively 
 and often absolutely inefficient. At the same time I 
 have more admiration for the spirit of the back-to-the- 
 landers than for the retired farmers; but I am the 
 neighborhood mossback, you must remember. 
 
 John Ackerman bought a house in a good suburb 
 and did his best to take things easy. But John isn't 
 that kind. He can't loaf. Unlike Herman Lutz, John 
 knew, or thought he knew, that country standards and 
 city standards were different; that he must do as the 
 Romans did. But he just couldn't help trying to make 
 his place as much like the farm as he could. He 
 brought in his light team and buggy, but they weren't 
 enough. The place didn't look right without a wagon 
 somewhere round. He might need a wagon for some- 
 thing some time anyway, so he brought one in and set 
 it in the side yard. This didn't appeal to Mrs. Acker- 
 man and the girls. Wagons under the dining-room 
 
20 tTHE FAIRVIEW, IDEA 
 
 windows might not do any harm, but tfie neighbors 
 didn't have them, and they made the place look coun- 
 trified. That was the beginning of the end of John's 
 efiforts to have his rural atmosphere about him in town. 
 Anything he brought from the farm was promptly sent 
 back or stored in the attic. One day he brought a 
 grindstone and some dull sickles, and after supper, 
 when the air was cool, went to work grinding them 
 up in the front yard, where the water was handy from 
 the hose. The hiss of that stone on the knives was 
 music to John's ears, but it had no charm for his old- 
 est daughter, who was entertaining a yoimg lawyer on 
 the front porch. John didn't grind any more sickles. 
 
 The next thing he tried was the real-estate business. 
 He built a little ten-by-twelve office next to a suburban 
 grocery store, got himself made a notary public, sat 
 down and hopped for business. He made a few deals of 
 small importance and then gave it up. It was too much 
 Hke loafing to suit an energetic, middle-aged man who 
 was used to work. His health began to fail. 
 
 One day I went in and found him covering a vacant 
 lot with lath sheds. He said rather sheepishly that he 
 was going to raise ginseng and make as much money 
 off that lot as he had off his whole farm. He gave 
 me a lot of catalogues and folders about the stuff, and 
 I read some of them but didn't start raising ginseng. 
 It would be a shame to get rich so quick. John was 
 rather happy with his ginseng bed until he found that 
 he was losing money. He wasn't working for exer- 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 21 
 
 else; he wanted the returns to which he was accus- 
 tomed. 
 
 So he got a job in a binder twine factory at a dollar 
 and a half a day. A fine job for a man with the brains 
 and training of John Ackerman! John's steers had 
 topped the Chicago market so often that he'd come to 
 regard it as the only natural thing; and there he was, 
 doing an unskilled laborer's work for a dollar and a 
 half a day ! 
 
 The family objected quite strenuously when John 
 took the job. They didn't want him to be a common 
 laborer. John contended that it was all right if he 
 came and went by the back door and the alley, so none 
 of the girls' beaux could see him in his overalls; and 
 that is what he did. It was funny to see him snooping 
 home in the evening and diving into the back door as 
 if somebody was after him. 
 
 He quit this job after a few months, and now he has 
 fenced up the back yard and is raising chickens accord- 
 ing to some system by which you can rear about forty 
 to the square foot. He hasn't been at it long enough 
 yet to find out for himself, but I'm glad whenever I 
 talk with him that I've plenty of ground for my 
 chickens to prospect round upon. 
 
 John isn't happy and he isn't well. Old farmers sel- 
 dom do well physically in town. When the Livermore 
 family left their farm and went to town they had an 
 old cattle dog named Shep which they couldn't bear to 
 leave behind. He had been a dog worth fifty dollars 
 
22 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 of any man's money on a stock farm, and was as active 
 and industrious a dog as I ever saw. He lived about 
 eight months in town — died of changed environment, 
 I have observed that the old farmers who "retired" 
 first when the retiring fever struck the country are 
 mostly dead or in bad health. They have gone the 
 way of Livermore's Shep. I wish we had statistics 
 on this; but Uncle Henry Wallace once said that in 
 his opinion retired farmers live on the average about 
 four years after they strike the pavements. I don't 
 think this is a particularly heroic way to die, but then 
 I'm the official mossback of the neighborhood. 
 
 The Ackerman boys are doing well in town. Henry 
 took the philosophical course at the academy, and is 
 now pastor of a little church in the suburbs. He has 
 good stuff in him, and a lot of advanced notions which 
 look pretty good to me when he imparts them in private 
 conversation, even if they are too radical to please the 
 one man who really owns the church — including 
 Henry. 
 
 "Did you ever," said I to Henry, while he was still 
 in the academy, "hear the old Sunday-school song 
 which ran : 
 
 " 'Far out upon the prairies how many children dwell 
 Who never go to meeting or hear a Sabbath bell ?' " 
 
 "No," said he ; "I don't think it is sung any more." 
 "It was in your father's day," said I. "It was writ- 
 ten by people in the East to call attention to the need 
 of missionary work for your father and me and Frank 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 23 
 
 and Bill McAllister and Al Raymond — ^little children 
 who lived far out upon the prairies. But we had better 
 church facilities in Fairview then than we have now. 
 All the smart yoimg preachers seem to be looking for 
 a call to a big rich city church. Eighteen million rural 
 churches in the United States died last year, and — " 
 
 "I am afraid, Mr. Dunham," said Henry, "that you 
 have been misinformed." He smiled a little at my joke, 
 and added: "But I know that the rural church is 
 dying apparently. It is a sad and perplexing thing." 
 
 "Not at all perplexing," I answered. "The rural 
 church is dying of an epidemic of Ackerman removals. 
 Every time I come to town I pass by the field of the 
 slothful and by the vineyard of the man void of under- 
 standing; and lo ! nettles cover the face thereof, and the 
 stone wall thereof is broken down. It's your father's 
 farm and your natural parish I'm mentioning, Henry." 
 And he went away sorrowful, for he had much ambi- 
 tion. 
 
 That was before Daisy Raymond came back to 
 Fairview with her new preacher husband and did 
 things in the vineyard — ^but that's a story in itself. 
 She's Old Mule Raymond's great-granddaughter. He 
 was called Mule Raymond because he drove mules into 
 the country while my father was driving oxen. Daisy's 
 father is Professor Wilfred Rasonond of the state lini- 
 versity, the son of Al Raymond who used to snare 
 gophers with me as a boy; but she and her husband, 
 whose name is Wiggins, have retired from the city 
 church — ^he's the Reverend Frank Wiggins — ^to take 
 
24 pTHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 over Henry Ackerman's bit of abandoned church terri- 
 tory. And that also is another story. 
 
 Will Ackerman is an extremely practical boy and is 
 doing well. He's gone into dentistry and is making 
 good money for a man just starting in. He ought to 
 have his office equipment paid for in a couple of years, 
 besides making a living. Hans Larsen, the Danish im- 
 migrant who works the Ackerman farm, will by that 
 time have skinned enough out of it to make the first 
 payment on a farm of his own. 
 
 Both the Ackerman girls were graduated from the 
 academy, went to the state normal school and are 
 teachers. They teach in small city schools at the edge 
 of town that look for all the world like country schools, 
 but are not half so attractive as is the Fairview Con- 
 solidated School since we joined the Fairview, Pleasant 
 Valley, Hickory Grove, Grant Center, Wheeler's Cross- 
 roads and Indian Ridge schools and made them one — 
 in a building that is big enough for a town school. 
 And yet the Ackerman girls, whose life blood was 
 drawn from Fairview acres, don't seem to think of the 
 old neighborhood as a place to teach in if they are 
 going to teach, or marry in if they are going to get 
 married. They have their eyes turned toward the big 
 school in the city. It seems to me that such girls are 
 missing a great opportunity for helping cotmtry com- 
 imunities. They are two fine, healthy, country-trained 
 girls trying to educate children with semi-rural sur- 
 roundings in schools which are forced to conform to 
 city school models; while New York City is working 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 25 
 
 on a plan to transport her children out into the coun- 
 try every day to get education from just such sur- 
 roundings as those which the Ackerman girls ignore! 
 Maybe the school authorities make them do this, and 
 perhaps they have to be inefficient to hold their jobs ; 
 but even so the situation is the same. 
 
 The trouble is, teachers prefer to stay in town where 
 they can have more pleasant associations outside of 
 school. I'll admit that most of our conventionally mis- 
 educated girls feel more at home in town than in the 
 country, but it isn't the fault of the country; it's the 
 fault of their education and of the farmers who retire 
 and take their educated families to town. Fairview 
 neighborhood isn't what it was when all the old set- 
 tler' sons were here. Tenant farmers on the whole 
 don't do a community much good. If they were th& 
 right sort they wouldn't be tenants very long. They 
 move on from place to place, robbing the soil of all the 
 fertility they can force out of it, raising their families 
 any way at all, and contributing nothing to the com- 
 munity. 
 
 I am afraid my readers may think that I regard rural 
 life in America as a total loss with no insurance; but 
 that would be a mistake. There is a great principle in 
 human affairs, as in physics, that action is equal to re- 
 action and in the opposite direction. After the Revo- 
 lution comes the Restoration; after the Republic the 
 Monarchy, after Napoleon the Bourbons; after the 
 Bourbons the Republic again. A reaction is already 
 setting in. The rural districts will be redeemed, I be- 
 
26 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 lieve, and rural life will win back the people as a 
 whole-life proposition, instead of a status to be fled 
 from as soon as the fetters of necessity are knocked 
 off. 
 
 The County-agent movement — we're just in the 
 midst of getting it started in Fairview — will show 
 country people how to be happy though farming. The 
 new kind of rural school, which is coming in so fast, 
 will bring up a generation of children in the nurture 
 and admonition of the Lord who has given them the 
 most interesting lot of things to learn and do in the 
 country that exist anywhere in the world. The new 
 kind of rural church will make more of the text, "Con- 
 sider the lilies how they grow." Some writer has said 
 that our grains are modified lilies ; but whether that is 
 the fact or not, I suspect that the Lord meant all 
 plants, including corn and beans and potatoes, when 
 He mentioned lilies. 
 
 The telephone will help, and so will better ma- 
 chinery, and cooperation among the farmers in work- 
 ing out their various problems ; and the motor-car will 
 do more than an)rthing else. For the motor-car gives 
 good roads, and command of a dozen towns, while city 
 residence gives you only one. 
 
 I think, in other words, that Herman Lutz, Johh 
 Ackerman, the Raymonds, the McAllisters, the Liver- 
 mores and all the others who have retired from Fair- 
 view went at the wrong time. They mistook the twi- 
 light before sunrise for the glooming fall of night. The 
 days of the pioneers are not over. Neither are the 
 
RETIRING FROM FAIRVIEW 27 
 
 times which call for missionaries "far out upon the 
 prairies" and in the farming districts generally. We 
 must grow our pioneers and our missionaries, as we 
 grow our crops, right on the spot — and in the Fair- 
 view District we are doing it. 
 
 I may be a little uplifted, as Old Man McAllister 
 used to say in his Scotch way, by what took place in 
 the little auditorium of our new schoolhouse last even- 
 ing. We had a moving-picture show, a lecture, a meet- 
 ing of our Fairview Club and a supper. Frank Wig- 
 gins, the teacher of the school, the county agent and 
 all our new people who are helping us to remake our 
 neighborhood life were there — everybody and his wife 
 and children — ^and John Ackerman came out from 
 town. 
 
 "Abner," said he, "I'm going to bring EHza out to 
 the next meeting. And if we can persuade her to force 
 me to move back to the farm, it will be all right with 
 me. 
 
 That's the nearest I ever knew John Ackerman to 
 come to an admission that he had been wrong. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 A CORN-BELT PIONEER — 1918 MODEL 
 
 DID I mention in that piece about "Retiring from 
 Fairview" the fact that Daisy Raymond Wiggins 
 had brought her husband up from the state university 
 and that they had begun reliving the pioneer life of 
 her grandfather and great-grandfather right here in 
 the Fairview neighborhood? I did? Well, now I'm 
 going to tell you all about it. 
 
 Her grandfather, Ezra M. Raymond, was older 
 than my father, and came to the settlement with some 
 pretty good chunks of boys befofe we did — about '53 
 or '54 I think it was. We drove in with oxen two or 
 three years behind them, but Old Mule Raymond, as 
 Ezra was called as long as he lived, because he came 
 in with mules, had more sense than we had. My father 
 bought land along the river because it had timber on 
 it. Mule Rajmiond took up his out on the prairies 
 because it had none. We spent ten years grubbing tim- 
 ber land before it dawned upon us that Mule Ray- 
 mond had done as much in the way of making a farm 
 on the prairie in two years as we had done in ten, and 
 had better land. Then we sold out to an Indiana man 
 who was used to roots and stumps and couldn't be 
 happy unless he was tussling with them, and bought 
 
 28 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 29 
 
 land alongside the Rajmiond farm — and paid six dol- 
 lars for it when we might have had it when we moved 
 in for a dollar and a quarter. 
 
 That man Knickerbocker, who wrote a history of 
 New York, tells, as a joke on the Dutch, that they 
 pretty near had to give up settling on Manhattan 
 Island because it didn't seem to be any fit place for a 
 town. It almost looked as if they had robbed the 
 Indians out of something not worth stealing. They 
 himted and hunted for a place fit for a townsite, and 
 weren't satisfied tmtil at last they found one low 
 enough so that they had to build dykes along shore to 
 keep out the tide. Then they hopped to it in a leisurely 
 sort of way. I believe the story is true. It's just the 
 same thing the early settlers did in the prairie states. 
 They hunted for land encumbered with brush and 
 timber because they were used to timber and brush. I 
 believe if they could have found rocks they would 
 have been happier — ^but they couldn't. And right be- 
 fore their eyes were those broad prairies of black soil 
 far richer than the timber lands, and all ready for the 
 plow! 
 
 Mule Raymond was eccentric in two things: he 
 preferred mules to oxen because they were faster, and 
 to horses because they were tougher, and he preferred 
 rich land ready to plow to fair-to-middling land which 
 had to be reclaimed. It took him a quarter of a cen- 
 tury to outlive these twin disgraces. 
 
 Al and Frank Ra)niiond were neighbor boys of ours, 
 but older than I. This did not prevent us from being 
 
30 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 good friends and playmates; but it cut short our fun 
 when Al, who was the one I liked best, got married at 
 the age of nineteen. ^ Why not? He had earned 
 enough working for Foster Livermore to pay for a 
 team and wagon, and could buy all the land he wanted 
 on grain payments — and Zeruiah Livermore was will- 
 ing to have him. So they were married. His first 
 child was named Wilfrid Livermore Raymond, and 
 he is a professor of something related to geology or 
 archaeology at the state university, now. I am told 
 that he knows all there is to know about his specialty. 
 There's everything in heredity, but when I think of 
 Old Mule Raymond and Doctor Wilfred Raymond, his 
 grandson, I am convinced that it is better seen by hind- 
 sight than foresight. 
 
 Naturally we had seen very little of Doctor Ray- 
 mond in the Fairview neighborhood for years. We are 
 not a scholastic people. He and his wife used to rusti- 
 cate among us once in a while during vacations and be- 
 tween his Voyages to foreign parts ; and once he came 
 all the way from the university to address us on the 
 occasion of our great Homecoming Week, when half 
 the crowd was composed of retired farmers who 
 flocked back from the cities and towns to see one 
 another and us, and to find out just how badly rundown 
 their farms were getting. That time they had with 
 them a little daughter about eight years old, who took 
 quite a shine to me, and called me Uncle Abner. She 
 and I spent an hour in my feed yards looking at the 
 steers. 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 31 
 
 She looked to me to be about ten years old when 
 she brought her husband to see me — ^but they look 
 younger to me now than they used to. 
 
 "Mr. Dunham," she said. 
 
 "What's become of your Uncle Abner ?" I inquired. 
 
 "I hope he's well," she giggled. "Do you remember 
 about that?" 
 
 "I never forget anything," said I; "and the neigh- 
 bors some of them say I never learn anything." 
 
 "Well," said Daisy, "you're going to learn some- 
 thing right now. I'm going to present to you my hus- 
 band, Frank Wiggins, and he's the most knowledg- 
 iferous person in the world." 
 
 "I'm glad to meet you," said I, — "you cradle rob- 
 ber!" 
 
 Daisy giggled again, and looked as pleased as Punch. 
 He wasn't very mad, either. My wife came out and 
 we had them in to dinner. He was a puzzle to me at 
 first. I don't know but he is yet. He was pretty well 
 dressed and looked to be about thirty. My wife in- 
 formed me after they went away that Daisy would be 
 twenty-six the twenty-seventh day of the next Decem- 
 ber. How they remember such things is past me. Wig- 
 gins was a clean, hard, brown-looking customer with a 
 mild eye, a beard which he keeps about at a two-weeks 
 growth, and a stocky build. I should say he would have 
 weighed a himdred and seventy-five and was five feet 
 ten. He was just the man for build that I have always 
 liked to get for farm hands. I was a little taken aback 
 when he told me in answer to my query as to his busi- 
 
32 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 ness that he was a preacher, but was looking for a job. 
 I had sized him up for a real-estate man or a life 
 insurance agent, or possibly when I noticed those mild 
 eyes, one of the newer breed of college professors that 
 like to be called Smith instead of Doctor, He was a 
 good single-handed talker, but wasn't talky. I noticed 
 that when he spoke he generally said something, but 
 he never used ministerial lingo. In fact, he more than 
 once dropped into that sort of just-folks language that 
 lots of starchy people call slang. That's why I was a 
 little surprised when he said he was a preacher — ^but 
 you never can tell nowadays. 
 
 "Where do you think of locating?" my wife asked. 
 
 "In the missionary field," said he. 
 
 "It's a noble field," replied my wife, giving me 
 thereby a sly dig, for I have always been a tightwad 
 when they begin to sing about Greenland's icy moun- 
 tain and India's coral strand. It always seemed to 
 me that we are pretty short on practical Christianity 
 right here in the Com Belt, not to mention Chicago. 
 "But," went on Mrs. Dunham, "it would be a great 
 cross to me to send a daughter of mine across the seas 
 to where they have leprosy and jaguars and cobras 
 and kill their little girl babies. I should feel that I'd 
 given everything to the Lord, and would never expect 
 to see her alive again." 
 
 "What cobra country," I inquired, "do you expect 
 to locate in?" 
 
 "Well," said Wiggins, kind of dry like, "we think 
 the Fairview neighborhood is about the jungle for us." 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 33 
 
 "You see, Uncle Abner," said Daisy, bursting in 
 while my wife and I were all aback and our sails flap- 
 ping, "Frank was a classmate of Henry Ackerman, 
 and when Henry told him that he had been much trou- 
 bled at what you told Henry about the Ackermans and 
 Raymonds and Lutzes and Livermores and all the 
 rest of us deserting the Fairview neighborhood and 
 retiring to the cities and towns just as though the 
 soil we grew up out of wasn't good enough to stay on, 
 I just told Frank that it was my soil just as much as 
 Henry Ackerman's — ^and it was just the sort of thing 
 we'd been wanting to do all the time. And so here we 
 are. Uncle Abner, on your hands, and you've just got 
 to put your shoulder to the wheel and boost !" 
 
 "The country church is dying,*? said Wiggins, "just 
 because we preachers haven't sense enough to do any- 
 thing but preach, and for the additional reason that 
 instead of curing the home-grown evils we have, we 
 prefer to fly to others that we know not of." 
 
 "If we are to endure things for the cause," said 
 Daisy, "why not endure them right here?" 
 
 "And save traveling expenses," put in Frank. 
 
 "And cut out the Afric's sunny fountains rolling 
 down their golden sand business," I injected, looking 
 at my wife. 
 
 "But, my dear," said my wife, "a person has to dress 
 better around here !" 
 
 And then Daisy began giggling like a ten-year-old. 
 
 "And then," said Mother, "being poor and hard 
 run for a living is one thing among black heathen that 
 
34 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 are all poor, but look up to you, and another among 
 white people who are rich and look down on you." 
 
 Daisy quit her giggling at that and looked sober. 
 
 "Aunt Lucy," said she, "that's a profound truth; 
 but Frank says that we have just got to go against this 
 game." 
 
 "It wasn't Frank, was it," said I, "that said 'For he 
 that is least among you all the same shall be great' ?" 
 
 "Oh, well," said the Reverend Frank, wriggling in 
 his seat as if on nettles, "this is a business proposition, 
 and I believe we can make a go of it!" 
 
 I sort of begun to like him then. 
 
 We found out by degrees, partly then and partly 
 since, that Frank had worked his way through a divin- 
 ity school by serving as athletic director; and went to 
 the university to take a course in psychology so he 
 could preach better. There he dropped one day into 
 a conference on the condition of the rural church, and 
 as a consequence flopped over to the agricultural col- 
 lege and specialized in rural economics. Daisy Ray- 
 mond was writing a thesis on Rural Sanitation after 
 taking a course in nursing, and they met. After that he 
 majored, in Daisiness and she in Frankism, and both 
 became enthusiastic over the idea that it was their duty 
 to do what they could to serve the people of the United 
 States of America, and especially the country people. 
 That talk of mine with the Reverend Henry Acker- 
 man, who was bom on the next farm and is now a city 
 preacher, had mighty little to do with their decision. 
 But I think it might have had some cqnnection with 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 35 
 
 their coming to the Fairview neighborhood. Old Mule 
 Raymond's alighting-place when. he flew across the 
 Mississippi in the fifties. 
 
 The church situation in our neighborhood was typ- 
 ically bad. There weren't as good church facilities as 
 fifty years ago. Then we had no church buildings, but 
 pioneer ministers used to hold services in the school- 
 houses frequently, and there was a Sunday-school 
 every few miles. As the country got richer, the fam- 
 ilies of the pioneer farmers kept moving to town, and 
 the town preachers, like the city doctors, had all they 
 could do to attend to their city practise. They didn't 
 care for us any more. They could serve the Lord by 
 wholesale in towns, but farmers were a retail proposi- 
 tion; and who can blame a man for laboring in the 
 wholesale vineyard rather than in the five- and ten-cent 
 line? Only the youngsters cared to ride the country 
 roads, and they weren't crazy about it. The churches 
 kept up a pretense of holding services in the school- 
 houses, but the congregations fell off. The folks and 
 the preachers had no chance to get acquainted. The pio- 
 neer ministers of years agone were more like us. The 
 towns of sixty years ago weren't so much different 
 from the farms as they are now. The age of special- 
 ization had not set in. There was the pioneer spirit of 
 getting acquainted which pervaded everything. Why, 
 when I was a boy we never passed a team on the road 
 without stopping and having a talk, and especially if 
 the people in the outfit were strangers. If an outfit of 
 strangers stopped at the house to inquire the way to 
 
36 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 the next town we asked them in to dinner, and were 
 pretty likely to tell them that it was too late to make 
 it that day and they'd better stop and stay all night. 
 If they stayed, we made up shakedowns on tRe floor 
 and slept with a family of strangers in the same room 
 with not half the impropriety a man sees in a sleeping 
 car to-day. Why, strangers were better acquainted then 
 than most neighbors are now. In that sort of atmos- 
 phere, and the old-fashioned attitude of veneration to- 
 ward the clergy there was no such divisive strife be- 
 tween towa and country church affairs as exists now. 
 So I am perfectly safe in sa3H[ng that when Frank Wig- 
 gins and Daisy came ta us — and it's just the same to- 
 day in most rural neighborhoods — ^the preacher who 
 really devotes himself to a rural pastorate in the dead- 
 and-done-for church surroundings of the twentieth 
 century is more of a pioneer than were the ministers 
 of the prairie settlements of the middle of the nine- 
 teenth. 
 
 There was an old brick church on the comer of my 
 farm which had not been used except by sparrows and 
 wasps for twenty years. It had been built by a con- 
 gregation of Winebrennerians from Pennsylvania be- 
 fore the war, and closed by a lawsuit and general 
 fracas in the time of Elder Hershberger about 1870. 
 The old Pennsylvania Dutch settlers died off and their 
 children went to town or to Dakota or Western Can- 
 ada. The land had reverted to me under a clause in 
 the deed under which I gave it to them. The roof was 
 bad, and the floors ruinous, and the windows all out; 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL Z7, 
 
 but except where the bricks had fallen out under some 
 of the windows and over the doors, the walls were in 
 pretty fair shape. If it hadn't been so far from the 
 farm buildings I should have converted it into a cow 
 stable or something of the sort, but it was at the other 
 end of the place. It typified in brick and moldering 
 wood the decline of the rural church in thousands and 
 thousands of farm communities. 
 
 "I- want you to give me the old Winebrennerian 
 church," said Mr. Wiggins. 
 
 "Well, if that's all," I began. 
 
 "It isn't all," said he. "How many acres are there 
 in that marsh back of the church ?" 
 
 "About fifteen acres," said I. "You don't want 
 that, do you?" 
 
 "Yes," he answered, "I want that, too." 
 
 The marsh was of small use to me, because I couldn't 
 drain it. To do so I had to discharge the water on the 
 land across the road, and I never had been able to get 
 consent from Abel Bohn, the son of one of the original 
 Winebrennerians. He was sore at me because I didn't 
 let him have the church, as the last member of the con- 
 gregation — ^a sort of cook, and captain bold and mate 
 of the Nancy brig. Abel and I were not very friendly 
 — ^all on account of the marsh. It bred mosquitoes, and 
 it was only in dry seasons that it could be mowed — 
 and then the hay wasn't very good. But he wouldn't 
 let me discharge the water on him. 
 
 "Got any money ?" I asked, looking at Mr. Wiggins. 
 
 ^The Reverend Frank looked at Daisy inquiringly. 
 
38 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 "Three hundred and eighty-seven dollars," said she, 
 "and sixty-seven cents. But we've oceans and oceans 
 of clothes, and we can live a long time on that. If we 
 wait for money enough, Uncle Abner, it will show that 
 we haven't enough faith to make a success of the work 
 anyhow — and nobody will ever endow us." 
 
 "Two young fools !" said I — ^but I finally told them 
 they could have the ruins and the swamp. 
 
 What they expected to do with this equipment was 
 a mystery to me; and the wonder extended to the 
 whole neighborhood when early in April the Reverend 
 Frank Wiggins and his Daisy wife appeared one day 
 when the woolly anemones were peeping up through 
 the dry grass at the roadsides, and the marsh pools 
 were gilded with cowslips, and took possession of their 
 church and its aqueous glebeland. 
 
 "For the land's sake !" exclaimed Mrs. Hans Larsen, 
 wife of the Dane who was John Ackerman's tenant 
 that year, "yust look what the preacher's doin' in the 
 old churchyard 1" 
 
 I stepped out back through the grove and looked. 
 There was a nice wall tent pitched under a tree on the 
 south side of the old church, with a fly stretched by 
 its ropes to trees. The few neglected graves were 
 within a stone's-throw. Passing back and forth from 
 a dray to the tent were Daisy and the Reverend Frank 
 carrying cooking utensils, hammocks, books, cameras 
 and typewriters. A banjo and a fiddle hung on the 
 side of the tent — I could see them plainly etched against 
 the white canvas. A camp-fire was already sending up 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 39 
 
 its azure smoke into the chill blue April sky. The 
 Wigginses had moved in ! 
 
 "'Foxes have holes,' Uncle Abner," said Daisy, 
 " 'and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of 
 man hath not where to lay his head.' Why should we 
 worry when we have such a bully place as this tent ?" 
 
 "Ish ka bibble," said the Reverend Frank. 
 
 "Well," said I, "about the time the mosquitoes be- 
 gin to come out of the marsh, you'll begin to bibble." 
 
 "Oh, I'm going to drain the swamp," said he. 
 
 "I think I see you!" said I, having in my mind's 
 eye the sour visage of Abel Bohn whenever I alluded 
 to drainage — but, of course, Frank was not only 
 joking, but himself a joke — as yet. 
 
 He started around the day after they got settled and 
 visited every house for miles on his motorcycle, leaving 
 hectographed invitations to religious services at the 
 schoolhouse the next Simday. My wife and I went. 
 Everybody went. That camp they had estabUshed in 
 the old churchyard was the best advertisement they 
 could have had. We wondered what sort of religion 
 he would preach anyhow. The Wigginses were so odd 
 in their methods that we thought maybe it would be a 
 sort of Salvation Army or Holy Jumper affair. But 
 there wasn't a thing out of the ordinary, except that 
 Daisy led the singing with her fiddle, and the Reverend 
 Frank dominated the soprano with a round baritone. 
 Daisy played a violin solo which we all liked, but any 
 one could see that she never would be able to set the 
 world afire as a violinist. 
 
40 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 When the services were over Daisy crept into the 
 hearts of all the old settlers' wives by talking old times 
 in Fairview; and captured the rest in other strategic 
 ways. Frank had a word with every person there who 
 didn't hurry away to keep from being solicited to sup- 
 port the new preacher — ^and there were not a few of 
 those. Daisy and Frank went home with us to dinner, 
 and several neighbors went along. We simply had fun 
 that day, with Daisy and Frank leading the merriment 
 ■■ — ^you know the kind of time we sometimes have when 
 people get so full of laugh they can't stop, and anything 
 at all is funny. I'm sorry these affairs get fewer and 
 fewer as we grow older. Why need it be so ? 
 
 Frank and Daisy went back to what they called their 
 pavilion pretty soon after dinner, and left us to discuss 
 the sermon. 
 
 "Not what you'd call an eloquent man." 
 "Good, clear, common-sense talk, though." 
 "I should say he'd never make 'em hit the sawdust 
 trail in droves." 
 
 "Got a peach of a wife, hain't he, now?" 
 "She gets good expression out of the violin, but as 
 for power — she ain't there." 
 
 "Well," summed up my wife, "it was as good a gos- 
 pel seirmon as I ever heard ! But what was left out of 
 that service ? It seemed all right — but what was lack- 
 ing?" 
 
 We sat in offish thought a while, and then I slapped 
 my thigh and shouted, "Gosh 'Imighty ! He never took 
 up the collection!" 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918< MODEL 41 
 
 The liext development in the Wiggins experiment in 
 Com-^elt pioneering was about the next Saturday. I 
 met Abel Bohn and asked him how he liked his new 
 neighbors. 
 
 "Brother Wiggins is a fine man," said he. "He is, 
 maybe, like our old preachers who did not preach for 
 gold, but worked on their farms six days and preached 
 to their neighbors the seventh. That would be some- 
 thing different to what we have in the towns now." 
 
 "I don't suppose," said I, "that he ever did a da/s 
 work on a farm in his life." 
 
 "He has done three," said Abel, "for me — ^this week 
 already." 
 
 He had been plowing for com, Abel told me, and 
 could drive three horses and handle a sulky plow as 
 well as any one. What he lacked in experience, Abel 
 said, he made up in gumption. It would be fine to 
 have the old church in the hands of as good a man and 
 as good a worker as Brother Wiggins. 
 
 "Brother Wiggins and I," said Abel, just as I started 
 my engine to move on, "arcgoin' to dreen that marsh 
 you necklectet so long." 
 
 I was dumfounded at the progress this young 
 preacher had made with Abel in a week, and I had 
 nothing to say for a moment. 
 
 "You see," said Abel, "I hain't got no water on that 
 end of the farm and I'm turning it into pasture for a 
 while, and I need water for the stodc. Brother Wig- 
 gins says he will dig the sump and lay the tile in the 
 marsh, if I'll buy a windmill and pump to lift the water 
 
42 ,THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 up across the road to my land. I'll put in a concrete 
 tank to catch it, and have just what I want. It'll be a 
 fine water supply, and Brother Wiggins will always 
 care for the windmill so it will be no trouble to riie. 
 And if the windmill will take care of the water from 
 fifteen acres, he will have the nicest little truck farm 
 in the coimtry. He has brains. I can work with that 
 kind of a man!" 
 
 I admit I was vexed, as I left my tactful old neigh- 
 bor, with his slam at my lack of brains; but by the 
 time I got home the joke of it had dawned, and my 
 wife asked me what I was grinning about. She was 
 as much pleased as I was. Why not? If any one 
 needed managing ability, that young preacher did. He 
 had neatly extracted from me the old church — which 
 was worth less than nothing — and fifteen acres of 
 marsh to go with it forever as long as he or the church 
 society he might forrh should use the church as a place 
 of worship, and now he had got the consent to dis- 
 charge the water across the road, which I had been 
 trying to get out of old Abel for ten years — and made 
 Abel like it and pay most of the expense — ^and seemed 
 to stand a chance of making the fifteen acres worth 
 forty-five hundred dollars by a few tiles, some ditch 
 digging, a little excavating, and old Abel's money. At 
 that rate he would do — ^he certainly would do ! 
 
 "Why," said Daisy, "it was so simple when Frank 
 and Mr. Bohn got talking about it. He wanted the 
 water, and Frank wanted to get rid of it!" 
 
 Saturday afternoon Frank pitched in the first base- 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 43 
 
 ball game of the season, and was elected captain of the 
 Fairview team. We had never had a regularly organ- 
 ized team before, but Frank told them that he believed 
 we had some good timber if it could be developed; 
 but they had better not elect him captain because they 
 might want to play Sunday games, and he'd be busy 
 on Sundays. Never said a word against Sunday base- 
 ball — but he'd be busy. 
 
 "Well," said Bill Ames, the shortstop, "whaddye 
 say we all go to church Sundays as long as the pitcher 
 preaches, and play ball week days as long as the 
 preacher pitches ? " 
 
 "Put that in the form of a motion," suggested Clyde 
 Bohn. 
 
 "Don't do that, fellows," urged Wiggins; "I don't 
 want a darned one of you to come to church unless 
 you find it interesting. But I'll tell you if you all come 
 and help me out on some stunts I hope to put on, we 
 may make it as interesting as baseball — though that 
 will be going some." 
 
 Notice this : He didn't ask any pledges of any one 
 at that time, and he asked them not to make any. 
 This and his failure to take up the collection, and his 
 deal with Abel Bohn, aind his flim-flamming me out of 
 the church and fifteen acres of land advertised his 
 proposition like the mischief. The schoolhouse was 
 crowded the next Sunday. The baseball crowd was 
 out in force — ^boys who had utterly lost their church- 
 going habit. Again the collection was omitted; but 
 the Sunday dinner at our house was not repeated. Out 
 
44 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 of several invitations, Daisy and Frank accepted that 
 of Mrs. Larsen, the wife of the tenant of the Acker- 
 man farm. Some of us who had gathered in twos and 
 threes along the road began discussing the matter of 
 supporting the minister. I guess this was just what 
 he expected we'd do. He was a deeper piece of ma- 
 chinery than we thought. 
 
 Well, this was the way he began. We never should 
 have given encouragement to any preacher to start in 
 our settlement, if we had been consulted; but Frank 
 and Daisy Wiggins just came and began working with 
 us and on us, and the first thing we knew there they 
 were, neighbors and friends, with a lot of things going 
 in which we were interested and which couldn't go 
 on without them. He slipped up on our blind side, 
 you see. We belonged to all sorts of religious de- 
 nominations by tradition or in fact, and had no church 
 sympathies at all, and a great many church antipathies. 
 Abel Bohn believed in the old Winebrennerian prac- 
 tise of footwashing, and all the rest of it. I had al- 
 ways carried my religion in my wife's name, and I 
 suppose that rated me as a Congregationalist. Abel and 
 I were as far apart on church traditions as we had 
 been on that pesky drainage problem, but Frank Wig- 
 gins worked us into his plans on both. In less than 
 a month Abel and I called a meeting of the people 
 who were attending the meetings in the schoolhouse, 
 to consider what we ought to do about having the col- 
 lection taken up, and ridding ourselves of the disgrace 
 of having as nice folks as the Wigginses living in a 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 45 
 
 tent, while we all had good homes. I suspect now that 
 he figured that we would do about this. 
 
 We sent for him and told him our troubles. Didn't 
 he think we had better pass the contribution box at 
 the meetings as long as we were getting the benefit of 
 the services. He got up, and, of course, I expected him 
 to address us as "Brethren and Sisters;" but he said 
 
 "Neighbors " and went on to tell us his notions. 
 
 He didn't believe it would be a good plan to establish 
 the organization on the contribution-box basis. You 
 never could tell how you were coming out on that. It 
 always began like a bumblebee — ^the biggest when it 
 was born. He thought that as a business community 
 we ought to consider : first, whether this thing of hav- 
 ing a place of worship is worth anything, and, second, 
 whether we can pay for it. If we decided to keep the 
 thing up, we ought to organize. 
 
 When he said "organize" I noticed the Methodists, 
 Congregationalists, Lutherans, Catholics, Presb)rteri- 
 ans and Abel Bohn all begin to draw apart. The peo- 
 ple of the younger set, lost as most of them were to 
 all church loyalty and other means of grace, were eager 
 to get things going, because they wanted Daisy to 
 stay to help in the work of the women's club she 
 had started, to carry on the anti-fly campaign, to 
 teach them some new dance steps, and teach a do- 
 mestic economy class they had organized. The boys 
 wanted Frank to pitch against the Elm Grove base- 
 ball team at the county fair. Both boys and girls 
 wanted the banjo and fiddle in the new string band. 
 
46 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 The mothers of Frank's Boy Scout organization 
 wanted him to stay because he was making the kids 
 better boys. There was an egg circle which the Wig- 
 ginses had org^ized for the purpose of getting better 
 prices out of eggs — Frank and Daisy had a small flock 
 of hens by this time and a cow staked out in the marsh 
 — ^and these women, girls and boys hated to have the 
 egg circle broken up. Frank had the preliminary work 
 under way, too, for a beef ring to systematize the kill- 
 ing of beef so we could all have fresh meat about all 
 the time, and a meeting had been held of which he was 
 elected secretary to correlate the ownership of pure- 
 bred bulls with other neighborhoods, so we could trade 
 off in a systematic way and never be at a loss for just 
 the animal we wanted. Under this the whole thing was 
 worked out years ahead, and a lot of men were going 
 from scrubs to pure-breds on the crest of the coopera- 
 tive wave. Maybe he hadn't got all these things started 
 at that time, but they were in the air and have been put 
 on the map since. The point I wish to make is that 
 the Wigginses had filled the whole neighborhood with 
 a sort of get-together spirit. We were better neigh- 
 bors already for their influence. We were more just 
 and more charitable to one another's faults. There was 
 a warmth in the air more penetrating than that of 
 spring — a warmth a little like that, I suppose, which 
 in the time of the Apostles made people come together 
 when they "had all things in common ; and sold their 
 possessions and goods and parted them to all men as 
 every man had need" — but of course we did nothing 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEE 47 
 
 as absurd as that. Neither did our new feelings tow- 
 ard one another prevent us from looking suspiciously 
 at one another when the Reverend Frank Wiggins 
 mentioned the necessity of an organization. Did not 
 that mean a church? And whose church would 
 get the new organization ? All the old selfishness and 
 inbred prejudices and historical traditions and mu- 
 tually damning creeds began snarling at one another 
 in half the hearts present. 
 
 Don't think for a minute that the Reverend Frank 
 didn't know this; he had foreseen this very moment, 
 and recognized it as his moment of shipwreck or suc- 
 cess. His voice grew a little deeper. 
 
 "The trouble with this commtmity," said he, "lies 
 in the fact that about half of us are prejudiced against 
 all the churches represented here, and the other half 
 are divided in preferences among so many churches 
 that no group of us can keep a church alive. Now 
 what shall we do ? Ask every one to change to a new 
 faith and a new ritual? Select the faith and ritual of 
 a few and ask the rest to conform to that? Perhaps 
 that might be best if it could be done. Why not 
 do in an organized way what we have been so 
 happy in doing in an unorganized way? We have 
 been meeting and working in the field of our 
 agreements, and ignoring our differences. We agree 
 in feeling a desire for a meeting place in which 
 we shall seek righteousness and worship God. I 
 do not remember a single service held here in which 
 anything has taken place in which any member of 
 
48 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 any Christian church could not take part. Nay, I do 
 not remember anything which could have shocked 
 an intelligent and reverent Jew or Hindu. God is 
 greater than any Christian denomination, or all Chris- 
 tian denominations, and righteousness not only is 
 found in every land and in every faith, but it ante- 
 dates the Ten Commandments. Why not each keep to 
 the church faith in which he believes ; and at the same 
 time associate ourselves to do such things as are seemly 
 and profitable in all faiths? I would suggest that a 
 committee on organization be appointed to report in 
 half an hour, with a plan for keeping up our neighbor- 
 hood meetings and the social activities to which they 
 have given rise. They are surely important enough to 
 justify that. Surely they are better than nothing. If 
 we can't do what each would like to do, let's see if 
 we can't do such part of that as all want to have 
 done." , 
 
 Abel Bohn moved the appointment of the commit- 
 tee and I seconded it. Both of us were on the com- 
 mittee, with the preacher, Hans Larsen and Wilson 
 Beebe's wife. In half an hour Frank Wiggins was 
 reading the report of the committee recommending 
 that we organize the Fairview Meeting House Asso- 
 ciation "for the purpose of maintaining a house for 
 the worship of God and the doing of such other work 
 as shall be for the common good." And that's all there 
 was of it. Nobody was to change his religious belief. 
 We were simply to associate to save from neglect those 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 49 
 
 things in which we all believed, notwithstanding that 
 there were things on which we differed. We didn't call 
 it a church — and I don't suppose it is a church. It's 
 merely a building kept up by those who do hunger and 
 thirst after righteousness and want to be filled col- 
 lectively because it is a sort of demand that can't be 
 met fully in an individual way. Everybody calls it 
 Frank Wiggins' church; and whether it is a church 
 or not is never discussed among us. We have so many 
 other things to consider whenever we meet. 
 
 Well, we organized. And we financed the church 
 just as we would have financed a live-stock associa- 
 tion. Each of us went on paper for what we were 
 willing to pay weekly, monthly or yearly. We rather 
 pride ourselves on not passing the hat, and have now 
 got ourselves educated up to the point of not feeling 
 a sense of wrongness when we miss the collection. 
 
 Our minister said nothing about Sunday baseball, 
 but we have never had any of it since he became 
 strong in baseball. In fact his influence on the con- 
 duct of our young people seems, now that I come to 
 put the thing on paper, to be solely exerted by reason 
 of the part he with his wife seem to take in every- 
 thing. It's a good deal like the influence the holder of 
 a big block of stock has on the conduct of a corpora- 
 tion. Frank and Daisy possess about fifty-one per 
 cent, of the stock in everything going. Take dancing, 
 for instance. We used to have some mighty substand- 
 ard social affairs called dances. You know the sort I 
 
50 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 mean — Ed Bascom and his brothers, with their or- 
 chestra, would hire a hall somewhere and sell tickets 
 to the boys, "ladies free," and keep- it just decent 
 enough so the constable could wink at it, and not bad 
 enough so that when the daughter of Hans Larsen or 
 Aleck Wolfe sneaked off to it with one of the boys 
 and was found out by her mother she could not say 
 it was a perfectly decent dance and prove it by telling 
 off the list of guests — if she could be allowed to pick 
 out the names from the list. The Wigginses put those 
 dances out of business by taking charge of the dancing. 
 I suppose it has been three years since we have had 
 Such a dance, and there has been more dancing here- 
 abouts in that time than ever before. The difference 
 is that the young folks dance on all sorts of occasions, 
 half a dozen couples on the front veranda or twenty 
 couples when the barn is cleared of hay. When we 
 have a general sort of hop it is sure to be after a lec- 
 ture by a professor of the agricultural college or a 
 strawberry festival or a township fair; and all the 
 old folks are there and can take their girls and boys 
 home with them. Some of us aren't any more enthu- 
 siastic about dancing than we were of yore, but we 
 see that the way it's done here it bears about the same 
 relation to the vicious dances we used to deplore that 
 a game of cribbage by the fireside does to a poker game 
 in the back room of a pool hall. If it isn't exactly a 
 means of grace it certainly isn't the road to disgrace. 
 It seems to carry off the leg electricity in a harmless 
 way like a lightning rod. 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 51 
 
 The Reverend Frank Wiggins has had and is having 
 a profound effect on our life, just because he is a part 
 of it. The ordinary run-of-mine sort of preachers 
 aren't. He has become about the best farmer in the 
 neighborhood. After he got the swamp drained, a lot 
 of us discovered that with land as high as it is now, 
 it pays to pump water from low lands for drainage 
 purposes. Several tenant farmers have learned from 
 Frank that they can make good money on small farms, 
 and Frank has induced the owners of big farms to sell 
 them smaller tracts. I learned from him that these 
 drained marshes need potash fertilizers, and so have 
 others. He now hires a man all the year around 
 on that fifteen acres of glebeland, and makes a little 
 money from it. I don't believe it is possible for the 
 country churches to be revived except by ministers who 
 take stock personally in rural life. The right sort of 
 men and women can do in thousands of places just 
 what Frank and Daisy Wiggins have done here. 
 
 They are prominent people in the economics and edu- 
 cational life of the community. It was Frank who led 
 the way for the consolidated school here. It was Frank 
 who welded into union so many of the people of the 
 Fairview, Pleasant Valley, Hickory Grove, Grant Cen- 
 ter, Wheeler's Crossroads and Indian Ridge school 
 districts that we were able to merge the six schools into 
 one with several teachers and a public auditoriuih. 
 
 "Uncle Abner," said he, "our boys and girls have 
 to leave home as soon as they have got fairly started 
 in their educations, and where they go they are edu- 
 
52 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 cated away from the farm. Why not give them all 
 the education right here that most of them will ever 
 get, and education of the right sort?" 
 
 "Aren't you afraid," I asked, "that a big consoli- 
 dated school, with an auditorium and all that will do 
 a lot of the work we are doing through the Meeting 
 House Association — and sort of weaken us ?" 
 
 "Uncle Abner," said he, "if that turns out to be the 
 case, it will prove that we are doing what the com- 
 munity ought to do for itself through taxation. Our 
 church may live forever, or it may die with us who 
 have established it; but the school, based on govern- 
 ment and supported by taxation lasts as long as the 
 government lasts. And I can see things enough to do 
 to keep the congregation busy when the school takes 
 off our hands some of the work we have done because 
 there was no other agency to do it. If I have children 
 to bring up in Fairview, I shall want a good school. 
 And I'm for it now." 
 
 We got it — and that's the biggest thing Frank Wig- 
 gins has done for us. He brought Tom Whelpley of 
 Tennessee into our neighborhood. But to go back to 
 the day we organized. The first question before the 
 new organization was the question of building. There 
 were two big jobs to be done — ^the rebuilding of the 
 old church and the erection of a parsonage. 
 
 "We don't want any parsonage — ^this winter," said 
 Daisy. 
 
 "Why, you don't mean to say," said Mrs. Beebe, 
 "that you expect to live in that tent in the winter !" 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 53 
 
 "I'd rather live in that tent just as it is, Mrs. Beebe," 
 said Daisy, "than in the house my cousin Jim Liver- 
 more makes you live in on his farm! And further," 
 she went on, after the laugh had subsided, "Frank 
 worked in a railway graders' camp one winter, and 
 knows how to fix up a tent to be as habitable as the 
 dwellings of thousands of working people who haven't 
 houses of their own. And I just know you're going 
 to fix up the old church beautifully, with a study room 
 somewhere, and we shall spend most of our time there 
 anyhow, and keep open house in the church every day 
 for everybody. We shall use the tent for very little 
 except a bedroom and dining-room." 
 
 "We plan already," said Abel Bohn, "to have a din- 
 ing-room in the basement of the church." 
 
 "Then don't be silly about the parsonage!" said 
 Daisy — and we weren't. 
 
 One day the next summer, however, I overheard 
 a conversation between my wife and Daisy which 
 brought the parsonage matter to a head mighty sud- 
 denly. I was washing some harness back of the house 
 preparatory to oiling them, and Daisy and Mother 
 were in the kitchen. Mother was washing dishes and 
 Daisy was wiping. I was so quiet out there that they 
 forgot all about me, I suppose. I heard my wife's voice 
 raised in a sort of suppressed hysteria, and knew some- 
 thing mighty interesting, to women at least, was un- 
 der discussion. 
 
 "Well, now," said my wife, presently, "this living 
 in a teaot bss got to come to an end !" 
 
54 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 "Oh, I don't know," said Daisy, "I'll go to a hos- 
 pital, of course, and afterward — ^why are we any bet- 
 ter than the Indians who rear their dear little brown- 
 eyed papooses in wigwams, or the Arabs, who " 
 
 "Daisy Wiggins!" said my wife, "you must be sick 
 — to talk like that!" 
 
 "I think it would be kind of nice," said Daisy in 
 a sort of dreamy way. "My grandfather lived imder 
 a covered wagon in the pioneering days, right over on 
 the hill I can see from the door of the tent. I'd like to 
 put the seal of real pioneering on our splendid life here 
 in Fairview. I am the daughter of a whole line of 
 American pioneeirs — and I'm proud of it. Aunt Lucy. 
 And I like to think that my baby will come to a home 
 devoted to a sort of pioneering which the nation needs 
 quite as much as it ever needed that of his ancestors." 
 
 I slipped around to the telephone and had them call 
 Abel Bohn in out of the field. 
 
 "Abel," said I, "get that finance committee, and ex- 
 ecutive committee, and building committee together as 
 soon as the Lord will let you." 
 
 "What for. Brother Dunham?" he asked. 
 
 "We've got to build that parsonage P. D. Q." 
 
 "What's the hurry?" asked Abel, who likes his mod- 
 eration to be known of all men. "Brother Wiggins, 
 says that the tent " 
 
 "Abel," said I, "it isn't so much what Brother Wig- 
 gins or Sister Wiggins says about that tent, as what 
 the Chicago papers will say when they print pictures 
 of the warm quarters you have for your winter lambs, 
 
A CORN-BELT PIONEER— 1918 MODEL 55 
 
 and tell about the place in which Fairview Church 
 keeps the winter Iamb of its minister's family. Get 
 busy with those committees !" 
 
 We got busy — and we had the parsonage ready in 
 time. Daisy was cheated of her ambition to beat her 
 great-grandmother in pioneering on the prairies. She 
 will never see in the papers a picture of the tar-paper- 
 and-canvas tent in which was born her son, Ra3miond 
 L. Wiggins, President of the United States. 
 
 Well, that is the way we solved the rural church 
 problem in Fairview — ^and the school question as well 
 — but that is another story. It seemed the way to do 
 it under our conditions, and considering the fight we 
 are having to keep the Reverend Frank Wiggins from 
 being taken from us by uplift organizations, college 
 extension bureaus and the like, and in view of the na- 
 tional reputation he has reaped from the work, I guess 
 it is regarded as a success. In other neighborhoods 
 some ministers are doing a good deal the same thing 
 along denominational lines, they tell me, and doing it 
 as well as we have done it. But on that point we of the 
 Fairview neighborhood are distinctly and permanently 
 from Missouri. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE boys' revolt IN FAIRVIEW 
 
 WHY the town people should worry about the 
 rush of the country people to the cities puzzles 
 me. They certainly welcome us to their midst enthusi- 
 astically — until our money runs out. I know several 
 thriving suburbs in town that are built up mainly by 
 retired farmers, and several firms of real estaters who 
 have made fortunes out of them. We people in the 
 Fairview neighborhood are the ones to feel anxious. 
 Our neighborhoods suffer from the nomadic charac- 
 ter of the life which begins when the old neighbors sell 
 out or rent and move to town, to be succeeded by fam- 
 ilies of strangers who are renters and probably won't 
 stay with us long enough to get acquainted. Our 
 schools, our churches, our roads, our fences and our 
 soils suffer. The houses and barns suffer. The atmos- 
 phere of rural life suffers. We suffer. Take Abel 
 Bohn, for instance, and his experience and that of his 
 son and his son's wife with Clyde Bohn, Abel's grand- 
 son — ^that's a story in itself to a person interested in 
 our life on the farms. I guess I'll have to tell you 
 about it. 
 
 If Clyde had been Abel's son he would have had a 
 
 56 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 57 
 
 Bible name, like that of his father, Isaiah Bohn. Clyde 
 is a worldly name, from Abel's point of view. Abel, 
 the reader will, perhaps, remember, is one of the old 
 Winebrennerians that came to the prairies before the 
 war and built the church at the other end of my fa- 
 ther's farm, now mine — ^the old brick church which 
 Frank and Daisy Wiggins have made over into the 
 Fairview Meeting House. At the other end of the old 
 Bohn farm is a good piece of land, six forties, which 
 was taken up originally by Jake Millslagle, another 
 Pennsylvania Dutchman; and when the Millslagles 
 moved to Oregon, a good many years ago, Abel helped 
 Isaiah to buy it ; and there Clyde was bom, and given 
 his worldly name by his mother, who was a Harris, 
 and who knew not Winebrenner. She has always been 
 a little different from the rest of us, and won Isaiah 
 by the poetry she wrote under such titles as Spring 
 Reveries, Love's Sacrifice, Affection's Tribute, and 
 such things. She never got any of these verses 
 printed, except in the Fairview items in our town 
 paper, because, I suppose, editors print the poetry of 
 their friends before they let any one else in, and a 
 farmer girl in Fairview wouldn't have much chance to 
 break into the big poetry ring; but while lots of folks 
 think the poems of Isaiah's Harriet pretty mushy, I 
 don't see that they are any mushier than any other 
 poetry. They do seem to be built wrong mechanically, 
 though, compared with regular verses like Sheridan's 
 Ride and Curfew Shall Not Ring To-night; but they 
 are a lot better than this new Spoon River Anthology 
 
58 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 kind they talk so much about. So, I suppose, they're 
 nothing to be ashamed of. 
 
 Having a mother like that, Clyde was always a little 
 different from the other boys — that's why I mention 
 it. It really has nothing to do with keeping the boys 
 on the farm, excepting that ambitious boys are the 
 hardest to keep contented — and Clyde was ambitious 
 before he got sporty. Maybe his sportiness was just a 
 phase of his ambition. 
 
 He was a terribly smart boy when he first went 
 to school — our old school that we had before Tom 
 Whelpley came to the New Consolidated. Clyde used 
 to help the older scholars with their history and geog- 
 raphy before he could touch his feet to the floor while 
 sitting on those old seats. He was a leader in games, 
 too. We never had much fighting in our neighbor- 
 hood — in fact we have more now than ever before; 
 at least I call it pretty near fighting when two boys put 
 on gloves in our new gjonnasium and slam each other 
 around until their noses are bloody. But in view of 
 the fact that this new sport was introduced by the Rev- 
 erend Frank Wiggins, who taught boxing and other 
 |)hysical exercises while he was working his way 
 through college, and that it's all good-natured and ac- 
 cording to rules, what can we say about it ? It pleases 
 some of the boys greatly, but it looks a little rowdy ish 
 tome. 
 
 It would have pleased little Clyde Bohn, though, if 
 we had had this gymnasium at the time of which I am 
 jyriting. As it was, what fighting he did was done in 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 59 
 
 a mean sort of way as the result of boyish quarrels; 
 and as he pretty nearly always licked the other boy, 
 it gave him a sort of hard name, especially among the 
 women whose sons came home with black eyes as Af- 
 fection's Tribute from the son of the poet. Having a 
 hard name is a bad thing for a boy. I can understand 
 that the Spartan boy who let the fox eat his vitals out 
 rather than allow it to be seen that he had stolen the 
 animal was a hero; but if he had lived in a time and 
 place in which stealing is just plain petty larceny, pun- 
 ishable by a jail sentence, he would have been merely 
 a petty thief and no hero at all — ^and having no self- 
 respect he would probably have yelled bloody murder 
 at the first nip of the fox's teeth. Though what the 
 Spartans did with the foxes they stole is a mystery 
 to me. 
 
 By the time Clyde was twelve or thirteen he had 
 about finished with our little one-room school. He 
 could cipher right through the arithmetic, could bound 
 Senegambia, tell the course of the Xingu River, ex- 
 plain the cube root with the blocks; and before dislo- 
 cating his antagonist's bones, could tell him the name 
 of every one in his body. The little high-school girls 
 who were hired to teach this school knew a few things, 
 I suppose, that Clyde didn't; but they could really 
 teach him nothing. He had been filled with a sort of 
 craze for books and learning, but when he had reached 
 this point, and foimd nobody in the neighborhood to 
 go further with him, as is the case with many of our 
 brightest little country children, he began to get sick 
 
60 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 of school, much to the sorrow of his mother, Harriet, 
 who had already begun to see in him a future college 
 president or poet laureate. But Clyde found no more 
 pleasure in Partial Payments, Alligation Alternate and 
 bounding the Province of Saskatchewan. Purely be- 
 cause of our inferior and traditional school. He was 
 disillusioned. There was more fun in fighting; and 
 there was a lot more fun in Johnnie Whipple, son of 
 Eph Whipple of Indian Ridge, a boy about his own 
 age, who never had been able to get through Common 
 Fractions. Johnnie was full of jokes and hated books. 
 He was a fellow of such infinite jest that a Sunday 
 with him, in town or country, was one of continuous 
 joy. And why go on with reading and ciphering, why 
 tackle algebra and elementary Latin when Johnnie 
 Whipple was so much more interesting, was alive, was 
 ready for anything from a fight to a foot-race — and 
 would follow Clyde through fire and water. You know 
 how it is with these young Davids and Jonathans. It 
 just seemed to thirteen-year-old Clyde Bohn as if the 
 whole field of learning into which he had made such 
 extensive explorations as to have exhausted them, so 
 far as he could see, was a barren waste. The thing for 
 the future was Adventure — ^and Adventure, which has 
 made Funston a general, perverted Clyde into a tough 
 boy who hated books and family worship; and would 
 have sent him to France before his time if we had 
 been in the war then. 
 
 Do I seem to know more about Clyde's mental proc- 
 
JHE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 61 
 
 esses and spiritual yearnings than could be expected of 
 an old duffer of a farmer who never talked with the 
 boy for five minutes ? Well, I have the best of facili- 
 ties for finding out all about these things. I am Ma- 
 rian Dunham's grandpa — ^and Marian, not knowing 
 just what's the matter with her, thinks that she has a 
 purely altruistic, and perhaps a literary or philosophi- 
 cal interest in the subject of Anatomy of Character. 
 She is the little girl who made thirteen or fourteen dol- 
 lars on her school garden — or have I told about that? 
 She confides to me that it seems as if she has a gift 
 for seeing into the inmost souls of people. She doesn't 
 know how she does it; but it seems to sort of come 
 over her when she looks into a person's eyes. They tell 
 her their secrets, aspirations, faults and fears ; people 
 do. It's wonderful! But I have never received from 
 this pretty little analyst, in all her eighteen years of 
 research, a report, even a progress bulletin, on the 
 character of any human being but Clyde Bohn — or 
 "Clydie," as she sometimes calls him. But isn't this an 
 age of specialization? It was such as long ago as the 
 time of Doctor Holmes, who gives us a character who 
 dared not claim to be a biologist, or a naturalist, or 
 even an entomologist; but having spent his life on 
 beetles, did hope to deserve the title of Scarabeist. 
 Sweet little Marian, standing where the brook and 
 river meet, but possibly a little down stream from the 
 junction, is certainly a Clydeist. Consulting her from 
 time to time, I can go on definitely in my examina- 
 
62 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 tion of the problem of why Clyde and John Whipple 
 wanted to leave the farm, and why they don't want 
 to go now, except to serve their country. 
 
 It was because there was no Adventure on the farm. 
 It was because nobody at the boys' homes appreciated 
 them, but, on the contrary, drove them to such loath- 
 some tasks that the iron entered their souls. It was 
 because it seemed so humdrum to get up in the morn- 
 ing at six and milk; to carry coal for the stoves; to 
 curry sweaty horses, which would not stand like statues 
 when their riders vaulted lightly to the groimd from 
 their backs, and did not understand the slightest pres- 
 sure of the knee or the horseman's softest word as do 
 the horses of adventurers ; to be the garqon of the pig- 
 pen; never to see anything or be anybody or do any- 
 thing but plow, harrow, sow, reap, mow, cultivate, and 
 feed; to be a Reuben all your life; to meet boys who 
 have been to Chicago and even to the ocean, and to 
 know nothing except th^-Fairvie>v neighborhood; to 
 have fathers and mothers who wear country-looking 
 clothes, and have rough hands, when every story you 
 read tells about people who are so different ; to meet no 
 girls except the ones you have always known, and who 
 don't seem to have any subtle mystery, that lissome 
 grace, that high-bred air, that thoroughbred carriage, 
 that ability to swim up Niagara, to rope bronchos, to 
 sing in opera, to act in the movies, and to do every- 
 thing — ^as the girls do in the novels of Robert Cham- 
 bers — ^why, the very tramps bumming their way along 
 the railway had a better life than this, for they at any 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 63 
 
 time might rescue some one from a burning house 
 from which they had just been hounded by the honest 
 watchdog. And how could a boy ever be a great in- 
 ventor, or author, or actor, or athlete in the Fairview 
 neighborhood? The Fairview neighborhood was so 
 unutterably punk ! 
 
 Let me tell you, good American reader, that the 
 country boys are feeling like that by the million — and 
 as I fill up from my own experience, the gaps in Ma- 
 rian's innocent narrative, which tells so much more 
 than she imagines in it, I am strongly inclined to con- 
 clude that the greatest need for the country boy is ad- 
 venture. I wonder how they will be affected by our 
 Great Adventure in France, where, as I write this, our 
 farmer boys are pouring out blood, and routing in 
 fierce battle the dreaded Prussian Guards. 
 
 Marian says that Clyde never was a bad boy. Some- 
 times I suspect that she says this reluctantly, as if half 
 hoping it isn't true. But he has a very Dark Past. It 
 began with the drafting of Clyde and John in a ball 
 game between the Elites of our county seat and 
 the Alco club composed of the employees of the 
 Affleck Lumber Company. Clyde played shortstop, 
 and John Whipple second base, and they pulled 
 off a lightning double play, besides making some 
 other errors, and established themselves in the es- 
 teem of the Elites, a club which played for what 
 little could be collected at the gates wherever it 
 could get a game. Sometimes the players made as 
 much as three dollars a g^ie, and at other times they 
 
64 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 walked home. However, it was the first bit of wild 
 life these two farm boys had ever tasted and they went 
 home expanded to the full size of their clothes. /And 
 when the next Saturday, Plug Rafferty, manager of the 
 Elites, telephoned Clyde for him and his second-base 
 friend to report for play at Dillsburg the next day, 
 Clyde flagged Johnnie to come, and they went, (though 
 he well knew that one of the ways straight down to 
 the well-known hell of his Gt^andfather B(ohn lay 
 through Sunday baseball. They went in an automo- 
 bile filled with hard-looking baseball players, which 
 ran ten miles out of its way for them. Thui the tele- 
 phone and the motor-car, those two agencies ^hich are 
 supposed to make country life one grand sweet song, 
 literally grabbed these boys away, and tljat almost 
 permanently. i 
 
 The newspapers carry the idea to city people that 
 the telephone, the automobile, rural free delivery, the 
 parcel post, and good roads have revolutionized coun- 
 try life, and will stop the drift of farm people to the 
 cities. There is a chance for a good deal of error in 
 this. In fact mighty erroneous ideas are already 
 abroad. Many writers seem to think that it cures the 
 isolation of rural life when we get our daily paper, our 
 letters, and our packages delivered by the carrier right 
 at the front gate; and can call up our neighbors over 
 the wire and talk at will, or jump into the car and run 
 any number of miles, almost, to see them. 
 
 They fail to see that unless our Clydes and Johnnies 
 have something to talk about, they won't get much com- 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 65 
 
 pany out of telephone connections with the neighbors' 
 houses. The daily papers and our other mail brought to 
 our doors are a great convenience ; but they don't build 
 up community life much. They just put us in closer 
 touch with the outside world. As for good roads and 
 the automobile, it must be borne in mind that there is 
 a mighty small mileage of good automobile roads in the 
 country as compared with the farm frontage on pub- 
 lic highways, and that the average farmer has as yet 
 no car. Besides these facts, those of us who do own 
 cars find the motoring better toward town than out 
 into the wayback districts. That's one of the troubles 
 with these new farm privileges. While they do bring 
 us farmers closer together, they bring us in more inti- 
 mate contact with town life as well. It's as broad as 
 it is long — or broader. The effect upon our staying on 
 the farm or moving to town will depend on which of 
 the new contacts is most agreeable. 
 
 I went to look over a great machine at Madison, 
 once, and was shown an electric crane which was a 
 wonder. Instead of a hook or chains, it carried a great 
 magnet which would swing all over the big room for 
 the purpose of moving things made of iron and steel. 
 The operator would drop this magnet on a billet of 
 steel that twenty men couldn't have moved; and so 
 long as the magnet was not "energized" as they called 
 it, the billet of steel never knew the magne^: was 
 there. Then they would switch a current of electricity 
 through the magnet, and the steel billet clung to it so 
 .fiercely that when the magnet was lifted, the billet went 
 
66 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 with it, up into the air, over men's heads, across the 
 room, and down to the place where they wante^ it. 
 Then they cut off the current and there was no more 
 attraction between billet and magnet than if both had 
 been made of putty. It made me think of the attraction 
 of farming people to the lives they live, and toward 
 other ways of living. If the billet had been lying on 
 a stronger magnet, and one equally "energized," the 
 crane magnet couldn't have moved it. It moved it be- 
 cause it was loose. The pull of the billet on the magnet 
 was just as strong as the pull of the magnet on the 
 billet, they tell me, but the magnet was hitched up to 
 the machinery of the factory. If the billet had been 
 attached to machinery stronger than that of the crane, 
 it would have moved the magnet, and walked off with 
 it. It is all a question of power and attraction. I 
 never heard that the billet ever controlled the mag- 
 net ; and when I asked the fellow running it if he had 
 ever heard of the piece of steel dragging the magnet 
 off to its den, he laughed. He doubtless thought this 
 the query of a typical hick. 
 
 The city is the magnet. It is energized by all the 
 mighty currents of modem life. The rural people, 
 especially the boys and girls, are pieces of good hard 
 steel and iron which feel the pull of the magnet and are 
 carried off by it to its den because the base on which 
 they stand has no attraction for them, or not enough. 
 The telephone, the automobile, the parcel post, the 
 daily paper, the city man's magazine, the macadam 
 highway, rural free delivery, the movies reached from 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 67 
 
 ten miles in half an hour instead of half a day, schools 
 run by city girls and by country girls who are city- 
 minded, and anyhow, schools conducted in slavish imi- 
 tation of city schools — and not well conducted even as 
 imitations — churches either not occupied or provided 
 with young city preachers listening all the time for city 
 calls, the more and more numerous acquaintances 
 made by country people in the city — all these either de- 
 energize the farm as a magnet, or energize the big mag- 
 net and give it increased pull, while the attraction of 
 the human billets to their jobs and to each other can 
 be only slightly increased, unless somelJiing bigger, 
 better, and more powerful is built up in rural life which 
 will have more attraction for us than does the city. 
 
 Th^ increasing value of land cuts farmers loose 
 from their base in the soil by giving them the capital 
 with which to move to town ; and at the same time, by 
 making the struggle of the landless farmer to buy land 
 a pretty hopeless one, it cuts him loose from his base, 
 too, by destroying his optimism. At least that's the 
 way it looks to me from my view-point as the official 
 mossback of the Fairview neighborhood. 
 
 It was an open secret that Clyde Bohn was on the 
 point of breaking with his father and grandfather 
 when our new era began with the arrival of Frank and 
 Daisy Wiggins. Clyde was asking his father for his 
 "time." Isaiah was in despair. He had reached the 
 stage at which he was ready to do an3rthing to keep 
 his boy with him, but he didn't know what to do. We 
 are an old-fashioned people, and a patriarchial, in 
 
68 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 some respects; and a father is his son's boss. When 
 Clyde wanted his "time" it meant that he wished to 
 cut this family bond, go out into the world and work 
 for himself, buy his own clothes, board himself, and 
 be industrially a stranger to the Bohn farm. This 
 seemed to Isaiah a good deal like burying him, and he 
 refused; but he was not able to refuse in such a way 
 as to avoid making the breach wider. 
 
 "You're a minor," said he to Clyde, "and I'm en- 
 titled to your wages wherever you work And I'll col- 
 lect them, too! Now you go out and plow corn, and 
 drop this. When you're twenty-one I don't expect you 
 to think of your mother and me any more — ^but till 
 then, you'll keep on just as you are. Do you hear 
 me!" 
 
 "Then," said Clyde, "I'm nothing more than a 
 slave!" 
 
 "You're no more a slave than I was at your age," 
 cried Isaiah. "Slave ! The idea ! As good a home as 
 you've got ! Don't let me hear any more of this, young 
 man!" 
 
 "You let me have my way," demanded Clyde. "You 
 let me have my way, or I'll have it anyway !" And he 
 went to the corn-field ; for the habit of obedience some- 
 times persists after obedience itself has ceased. 
 
 Now Isaiah had come to feel that if Clyde would 
 only do things which were not wicked, he might amuse 
 himself as he pleased and not do a lick of work, if he 
 would only just stay at home and be good ; but he was 
 afraid to let Clyde go, for fear he would go to Sunday 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 69 
 
 baseball, pool playing, picnics with the town girls, and 
 maybe poker playing and drinking. He was afraid to 
 let him go; but the way he took of refusing convinced 
 Clyde that all the old man wanted of him was what 
 work he could do. His whole short life convinced him 
 of this sordid selfishness on his father's part. He had 
 had given to him calves, colts, pigs, and lambs; but 
 when they grew up they were always his father's. He 
 had no money, and no regular way of getting any. 
 Why didn't his father pay him something for his work, 
 and let him buy his own things? He asked himself 
 this, and could find no answer, except his father's 
 greed. He never admitted to himself that his father 
 couldn't separate Clyde, his little boy, from himself, 
 the farm, and that future when Clyde would have it alL 
 
 The money that Plug Rafferty had paid him for 
 pla3ring baseball was a wonderful thing to him. He 
 had walked home with John Whipple after the first 
 game, and in many a hollow they had stopped and 
 tossed back and forth those three silver dollars each 
 which Plug had given them. It was wonderful. They 
 had actually earned that money — ^and still more won- 
 derful, they had earned it by doing something which 
 was play for them, not work. 
 
 The older I get the more firmly I am convinced that 
 this national efficiency of which we hear so much talk, 
 is to be achieved, not by such tricks as doing things with 
 the fewest possible motions, but by developing our in- 
 dustrial system to the point where everybody will work 
 as Qyde and Johnnie played ball, for the joy of it and 
 
70 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 not for the wage. Then it won't make so much dif- 
 ference about the false motions we make. 
 
 And the best that Isaiah had been able to do was to 
 make Clyde believe that he was a slave! Not that 
 Isaiah was peculiar in this. Clyde wasn't the only 
 farm boy who felt the same way. Millions of the lads 
 take a good deal the same view of their lives — that's 
 what ails us. I guess my boys felt at times a good deal 
 as Clyde did, but none of them had what Harriet 
 Bohn, Clyde's mother, calls the lyric temperament — 
 which, as I understand it, is the temperament which 
 enables a boy of sixteen or eighteen to see in three sil- 
 ver dollars a symbol of freedom and joy and pleasure 
 and wealth achieved in perfectly corking ways similar 
 to those employed by Frank Merriwell. Any boy who 
 doesn't know the gentleman to whom I refer I wish 
 to congratulate — and pity. 
 
 Well, here was Clyde's Crisis. According to my 
 fair informant, the young hero, oppressed, misunder- 
 stood and worrying just terribly, spent many sleepless 
 nights over it. Remembering my own youth I am con- 
 vinced that if he did it was in executive session with 
 Johnnie Whipple. To all intents and purposes the boys 
 had already run away — ^all they awaited was the ma- 
 tu;rity of plans. 
 
 I shall fail — I am convinced of that — ^to make any 
 of my readers understand what it still means in such 
 communities as ours for a boy, the son of God-fearing 
 parents and the scion of the family of an old settler, to 
 run away. I sometimes read stories of boys disappear- 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 71 
 
 ing from, and then casually returning to their city 
 homes, as if the thing were only a trifle, instead of a 
 tragedy, as it is with us. I suspect that our city boys 
 have really lost the ancient conception of the act of 
 "running away." We inherit our terror of it, I think, 
 from the old days, not very long ago in time, but ages 
 and ages in change, when the boy who ran away from 
 the farm went to sea, or to the forest. His mother lay 
 through the sleepless nights shuddering at the thought 
 of reeling masts dipping their yards in climbing surges 
 as the ship dropped between the swells, with a speck 
 clinging to the yard — ^which was her boy ; or the cry of 
 the owl in the grove caused to flash on the screen of 
 her imagination the prowling Indian or the howling 
 wolf. That was running away when I was a boy, and 
 still more so in my father's time down in Maine. And 
 even now, the farm boy does not "leave home," but 
 "runs away." The expression carries the notion of a 
 slave, or at least an indentured servant, breaking his 
 bonds and losing his master all the money invested in 
 him, with this difference — ^the breach is wider when 
 the son goes, because in going he also breaks the Com- 
 mandments. 
 
 There is an unspoken feeling on the part of the 
 runaway son, especially if he has the lyric tempera- 
 ment — which, I notice, manifests itself in Fairview in 
 the licking of other boys and playing a good game 
 at shortstop— that even if he runs away as a bluff, he 
 becomes a recreant and a nincompoop, unless he makes 
 his bluff good. The runaway must not return. That 
 
72 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 is giving in, and crawling back, and failing in the es- 
 sence of the test. He may, and usually does, look for- 
 ward to the time, not so many years off, when he will 
 sweep up to the door which he is never supposed to 
 darken again, and alighting from his huge car with red 
 wheels, he convinces his parents of his identity — ^with 
 some difficulty, their eyes being dazzled by the sparkle 
 of the diamonds — and then leads from the car a 
 beautiful lady in rustling silks, saying magnani- 
 mously, "Father and mother, all is forgiven! Meet 
 my wife." Unless he can do something like this, he 
 must not come back. He must show them. After 
 years have passed, and the cars and diamonds and silks 
 and velvets fail to materialize, he may properly return, 
 because he is now old himself, and sees things dif- 
 ferently. But usually he doesn't return. It is a long 
 way from the end of the rainbow to the farm, and 
 the old ties weaken, and the new ties strengthen — or 
 maybe they just stretch out ahead between the rails, 
 and you blunder on using them to walk upon whenever 
 it isn't possible to get the brakeman to overlook your 
 presence in some empty going back to the mines. 
 
 Clyde and Johnnie were just ready to make the 
 break when something happened which, I believe, will 
 put such things out of the minds of the boys of the 
 Fairview neighborhood forever. 
 
 They were to leave home on Saturday. Clyde was 
 promised by Plug Rafferty a job in a livery stable so 
 long as he played for the Elites, and it was agreed 
 to protect his wages against any suit his father might 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 73 
 
 bring by slipping him a piece of money after every 
 game, and arranging that the livery stable manage- 
 ment should pay Plug ten dollars a month for Clyde's 
 account, and give the boy a place to sleep among the 
 horse-blankets and lap-robes back of the office from 
 which smelly lair he was to emerge when called by the 
 bell for night duty. Johnnie was given a situation in 
 Raffertys pool-hall as a — I was about to say "biUiard- 
 marker," but it would have been a concession to 
 British literature if I had. Every castoff worthless 
 son of a gentleman in the British books which I have 
 read ekes out — the words "ekes out" always appear — 
 ekes out, I repeat, "a precarious existence as a billiard- 
 marker." I do not know^ however, what a billiard- 
 marker is. If there is one in the world, I am sure he 
 is not in the Mississippi Valley. Johnnie, however, 
 was to rack up the balls, keep the tables clean, and 
 play pool for the house when business was slack, get- 
 ting his board and bed from Plug, and his money from 
 baseball — which comes about as near to the duties of a 
 billiard-marker as is possible in the Com Belt. Need 
 I dwell on the gulf which opened before the feet of 
 these two young rustics ? No. 
 
 The Reverend Frank Wiggins had just pitched his 
 tent in the churchyard of the old Winebrennerian tem- 
 ple, and was beginning his career as a truly rural 
 preacher, Daisy was rejoicing in the prospect of living 
 in a tent as a present-day pioneer in the missionary 
 field of the Corn-Belt rural church. Frank had already 
 thiiAble-rigged me out of the fifteen acres of marsh. 
 
74 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 and had wheedled Clyde's grandfather into letting him 
 drain it by pumping the water across the road on Abel's 
 land. He was fishing for men and boys, now, and 
 being a crack pitcher, was taking a census of the base- 
 ball material in the neighborhood. Bill Ames was his 
 first victim ; and from Bill he had obtained the names 
 of all the fellows in the neighborhood who constituted 
 baseball material, actual or potential. 
 
 "Clyde Bohn," said Bill, "is a corker at third. He 
 can play short, too. I can dub around pretty well at 
 short, but I can't play third for sour apples." 
 
 The next morning, which was Friday, Frank was 
 scurrying about on his motorcycle with his hand-bills 
 announcing the services the next Sunday, when he met 
 Clyde. 
 
 "Say," said he, "you're just the chap I wanted to 
 see." 
 
 "What for?" asked Clyde gruffly, for he felt no in- 
 terest in Frank or his church project — in fact he re- 
 garded his own interest in Fairview and Fairview af- 
 fairs of all sorts definitely at an end forever — or at 
 least until that time when he could return in the high- 
 powered car, and the rest of it 
 
 "Baseball," said Frank. "We're going to play on 
 the Dunham lot to-morrow morning." 
 
 "Who ?" inquired Clyde, who would have spent his 
 last breath turning over to see even one play in a game 
 of baseball. 
 
 Frank hurried over such of his list as he could re- 
 member, and hinted at an organized team. 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 75 
 
 "Do you pky?" asked Clyde. 
 
 "I pitch," replied Frank. "I was a pretty good 
 pitcher in college." 
 
 "Did you make the team ?" asked Clyde. 
 
 "Two seasons," said Frank; "but I must be all out of 
 form now. I hear you're a third baseman." 
 
 "Shortstop," stated Clyde. "Bill Ames told you 
 I'm a third baseman. He always wants to play short 
 himself." 
 
 "How is he?" asked Frank. 
 
 "Well," said Clyde, "of course we ain't any of us 
 in the varsity class, but Bill is good. Plug Rafferty 
 says Bill fields at short better than I do. We hit about 
 alike, but I've got a better whip." 
 
 "Then you're better at third than he," suggested 
 Frank. 
 
 "Maybe," admitted Clyde. 
 
 Before they got through with this fanning bee, Clyde 
 had agreed to report for practise the next day, and 
 bring Johnnie Whipple with him. The idea of a Fair- 
 view team rather appealed to him, but as something 
 with which as one who was passing out of the Fairview 
 life he had no personal interest — ^but he would come 
 out just the same. Before the game was over, he had 
 accepted the position of third baseman of the team, 
 with Bill Ames at short and Johnnie Whipple at sec- 
 ond. He seconded Bill Ames's motion that they cut 
 out Sunday games and all go to church as long as the 
 pitcher preached for them. Isaiah was moved to say 
 to his son that he believed Brother Wiggins was going 
 
Id THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 to do a great work among them, and that Clyde was at 
 liberty to take as many afternoons oflE to practise as 
 seemed necessary. 
 
 "I guess we can afford to do as much for the neigh- 
 borhood," said Isaiah, "as any of the neighbors." 
 
 This, from Isaiah, was the moral equivalent of an 
 embrace, a blessing and a new covenant of love on the 
 part of almost any other man. The Bohns are unde- 
 monstrative. They are firm, too ; and the Reverend Mr. 
 Wiggins, who had counted on baseball and the meet- 
 ings in the schoolhouse and afterward in the church 
 to cure Clyde of his dislike for the country, even though 
 he had no definite worthy purposes with reference to 
 the city, was gradually forced to the conclusion that the 
 boy's ailment was too deep-seated for that. The Bohn 
 ice was too thick over things at home — ^an ice of man- 
 ners and customs, which kept Isaiah from talking with 
 the boy about their bettered relations — Clyde wouldn't 
 have been able to discuss that himself, for that matter 
 — or to change conditions of life much for him. He 
 just assumed that Clyde had had a boyish tantrum or 
 so and had seen the error of them, still putting Clyde 
 in the wrong. Therefore he made a special effort to 
 be considerate of the boy, for about a week, and then, 
 under the drive of the season things became a good deal 
 as they had been before, except that Clyde and Plug 
 Rafferty had drifted apart, and that both he and 
 Johnnie were really proud of the Fairview baseball 
 team, which, built around the minister as pitcher. Bill 
 at short, Johnnie at second, and Clyde third, was a 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 77 
 
 good deal better team than we shall have again for a 
 long time, now that both Clyde and Johnnie have quit. 
 Clyde was captain, too, and that held him. In short, 
 the baseball team gave all the boys some pleasure, and 
 some responsibility. Pleasures and responsibilities are 
 great anchors. If Isaiah had known how to give his 
 son his welcome into real life as his father's partner, 
 with the attendant responsibilities and pleasures,, 
 Clyde's cure would have been complete. 
 
 But Isaiah didn't know how. I believe that's the 
 main trouble with the farm boys — ^their parents don't 
 know how to treat them as they must be treated if the 
 farm is to compete successfully with the city for their 
 allegiance. Our homes are traditional, our schools are 
 traditional, our churches are traditional; but our en- 
 vironment is not traditional. The railroad track at the 
 back of the farm, the macadam road to the city, the 
 telephone, the papers and magazines, the endless suc- 
 cession of motor-cars along the highway, electricity, 
 the airship, the motor-boat, the air full of wonderful 
 things, wars, sieges, strange devices, new thoughts — 
 these are in our environment. Our family lives are not 
 yet adjusted to it. I don't know how we can indi- 
 vidually adapt ourselves, and I think I'm smarter than 
 Isaiah Bohn; but because I didn't know, I have two 
 sons in Chicago that would be better off if they had 
 stayed here. So I have no right to blame Isaiah for a 
 failure which is so very common among us — ^a failure 
 which we farmers do not know how to avoid. I know 
 some of us do — but on the whole, we don't know how 
 
78 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 to avoid turning our boys against farm life any more 
 than we can give ourselves a proper system of short- 
 time credits to supplement the Federal Farm Loan sys- 
 tem or the cooperative agencies which we very well 
 know we need for marketing our products, or many 
 other good things. 
 
 Something more powerful than the individual 
 farmer must act to reconcile the boys and girls to the 
 farm. The church? Well, our church — if it really 
 is one — is the most active and socially powerful one of 
 which I have any knowledge, so far as the open coun- 
 try is concerned — and Frank Wiggins failed on Clyde 
 Bohn. All he could do was to hold him until the more 
 powerful thing could come along and give Clyde some- 
 thing worth looking up to in the way of rural occu- 
 pation — and curiously enough, Frank held him with 
 baseball more than with Sunday-school or sermons. 
 ^ Then the more powerful thing came along — the new 
 kind of rural school. It is more powerful because it 
 has back of it the nation's might exerted through taxa- 
 tion; and because no church can take everybody in, 
 while the school can and does. It came in the person 
 of Tom Whelpley, Fairview's New Hired Man, the 
 principal of our consolidated rural school. Tom ar- 
 rived on the scene just at the time when Clyde's Second 
 Crisis was on. Allen Whipple, Johnnie's older brother, 
 had come home from Butte where he worked in a cop- 
 per mine, and both Johnnie and Clyde had become 
 fired with the ambition to go to the mines — ^not with 
 Allen, who would not have thought of such a thing as 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 79 
 
 enticing the boys away, but to the mines considered in 
 a sort of broad general way. What they really wanted 
 was Adventure, and money of their own. Give the 
 boys those two things on the farm, and they'll stay. I 
 may have told you — if I haven't I will — ^how the Rev- 
 erend Frank tried to impose on us as county dem- 
 onstrator this Tom Whelpley, a Tennessee hill-billy 
 with an agricultural education, and a great talent for 
 country living. We kicked, and had to take him as 
 principal of our new consolidated rural school. 
 
 The new lever for moving things — a. ruralized rural 
 school — ^broke up the plans of Clyde and Johnnie, by 
 winning Johnnie. He had a natural bent for me- 
 chanics, and when that drunken German traitor to 
 the Kaiser, Adolph Tulp — he has never tasted liquor 
 since — was enlisted by Tom Whelpley to teach the , 
 boys of the school how to tie all the knots he had 
 picked up as a sailor, how to handle tools, and espe- I 
 cially how to do blacksmith work, he won Johnnie 
 back to the school and away from the mines. John 
 Whipple actually began to search for broken things 
 to mend on the Whipple farm, especially things made 
 of iron. He had been out of school for two years, 
 and refused to attend because there was nothing 
 going on there which interested him. Now he be- 
 came Adolph's right-hand man in the shop, presiding 
 over the forge. He is the boy who made the orna- 
 mental lantern, which Adolph says is the forerunner 
 of an art in our iron-working which will rebuild in 
 America the wrought-ironr aft of old Nuremberg. 
 
80 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 Whipple, his father, was on the school board, and that 
 lantern, which was made before we hired Tom, and 
 while he was living with the Wigginses, not only 
 cooked the goose of Clyde in his scheme to toll John- 
 nie off to the mines, but landed Tom Whelpley the 
 job as principal. Eph Whipple said that Tom was 
 "practical," because he not only taught the boys how 
 to set tires, sharpen plows, make clevises and the like, 
 but got lessons in geography, history, language, draw- 
 ing, and I don't know what else out of the job — and 
 made the boys work and like it. 
 
 Does this seem to you like a small thing? It is the 
 biggest thing that ever came to us. When that long 
 Tennessean began his work among us, and before he 
 began his school work in a regular way, he made a rec- 
 ord of the ambitions in life of every child ih the neigh- 
 borhood between the ages of ten and twenty. The 
 girls were all against farm life, except a very few; and 
 of the boys, four out of every five agreed with the 
 girls. Last week a similar straw vote among the same 
 children showed four out of every five of the girls, 
 and all but two of the boys strong for staying on the 
 farm till death — and among these was Clyde Bohn, 
 now just turning twenty. The ruralized rural school 
 will stop the drift to the cities. 
 
 How Tom got Clyde is of small consequence com- 
 pared with the big fact that he did get him — saved him 
 to country life, and kept country life from being im- 
 poverished by his loss ; and yet, to me, it is worth notr 
 ing as an instance of the sort of work the new kind of 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 81 
 
 rural teacher must do if we are to have the new kind of 
 rural life — a. life which can give cards and spades to 
 the sort of existence most of us farmers have to live 
 when we move to town, and beat it. Tom is a persist- 
 ent fellow — ^he had to be to work his way through one 
 college, and when he made his decision that he was 
 country-minded, and cotild not succeed in city schools, 
 to proceed to work his way through another, taking 
 so many years for it that he came to us at the begin- 
 ning of his real career with gray in his hair. He tried 
 ever)rthing as a bait for Clyde — ^and everything failed 
 for two years. He tried him on com and pig club 
 work, but Clyde wasn't interested. He tried him on 
 cow testing and was defeated by the skepticism of 
 Isaiah. He tried him on corn-root aphis control; but 
 Clyde became disgusted when his father insisted that 
 it was the ants that injured the com, and that Tom's 
 story that all the ants were doing was to take care of 
 the aphis which they use as people use cows, was too 
 thin for a practical farmer to believe. And then my 
 little granddaughter, Marian, who has always insisted 
 that Clydie is a good, but much-misunderstood boy, 
 told Tom how smart Clyde used to be in figures — ^and 
 Tom's face lit up like that of a detective when he 
 strikes the unmistakable clew. 
 
 That night he went to see Clyde. He took with him 
 a mass of figures relating to the costs of farming in 
 Fairview, the expenses, the values of land, the seasonjil 
 crises in work, the prices of the various crops, the bal- 
 ancing of rations for live stock, the cheapening of 
 
82 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 maintenance rations for taking stock through the win- 
 ter, the comparative profitableness of various farms. 
 
 "I need help," said he to Clyde. 
 
 "What kind of help ?" asked Clyde. 
 
 "I'm not very good in figures," admitted Tom, "and 
 these figures stump me — some of them." 
 
 Some^ of them stump the professors of agricultural 
 economics, and Tom knew it; but he was putting on 
 his celebrated sketch showing a person in the act of 
 being wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove. 
 
 "Here it says," said Clyde, looking over the data, 
 "that it costs Jim Milligan so much an acre for labor 
 for every acre of corn. Where did those figures come 
 from?" 
 
 "Young Barney Milligan brought them in," an- 
 swered Tom. "And that's another trouble! I am not 
 quite sure that all these figures are accurate. A boy or 
 girl has to have a sense of quantity in order to get 
 these facts right — ^and Barney is better in almost any- 
 thing else than in figures." 
 
 "Why do you call tobacco on the Myers place," 
 asked Clyde, still delving into the figures, "as profitable 
 as barley, when the figures show that the barley brings 
 in a third more for every hour of labor than the to- 
 bacco ?" 
 
 "Well," said Tom, "that's another thing I'm not 
 sure of. You see we loaded the figures for varying 
 conditions." 
 
 "Loaded figures!" exclaimed Clyde — for please re- 
 member, he was no Zerah Colburn in mathematics, but 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 83 
 
 just a good bright arithmetic pupil — ^"I never heard of 
 loaded figures." 
 
 "Well, you see," replied Tom, "barley competed 
 with com plowing and the hay harvest. A lot of the 
 work on tobacco is done in the winter when time isn't 
 so valuable. It is the same with work done on live 
 stock. These problems are hard — but it wouldn't be 
 right, would it, to call time put in on live stock or to- 
 bacco equal hour for hour to the time put in on 
 barley?" 
 
 "No," said Clyde, "I don't suppose it would." 
 
 "Would you mind helping me on these things?" 
 asked Tom. 
 
 "I'd like to," replied Clyde. "I never thought there 
 is much to farm figures — ^but there is, ain't there ?" 
 
 "The most difficult accounting I know anything] 
 about," replied Tom. "We have no really satisfactory i 
 system of farm bookkeeping or farm economics. If 
 we work out the thing in this school, we have a chance ^ 
 to find out more about it than they know down at the 
 agricultural college, and they'll be glad to have our 
 figures." 
 
 "Well," said Clyde, "I think the best thing I can do 
 is to spend a few evenings on my wheel checking up 
 these figures right on the farms. Barney isn't the only 
 one that can get them wrong. As fast as I get 'em 
 down to cases, I can come to the schoolhouse, and we'll 
 put them in shape. You know a lot more about it than 
 I do, but 1 believe I do know when a thing is true." 
 
 In a week, Isaiah asked Clyde gruffly when he was 
 
84 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 going to get through monkeying around with Tom 
 Whelpley, and Clyde told him that he would enter 
 school again, if his father didn't care. Isaiah, tickled 
 to death, said he didn't care. Clyde informed him that 
 in working out some figures for Tom Whelpley, he had 
 discovered that in order to understand them he had to 
 do some studying — besides, Tom had placed him in 
 charge of the class in Farm Accounts under the super- 
 vision of Mr. Whelpley. 
 
 Clyde had succumbed to the lure! It has made a 
 new boy of him. What he needed — ^what all our boys 
 and girls need — is to have work that they can look up 
 to. Tom Whelpley showed Clyde Bohn — as he shows'^ 
 all our young folks — ^that there is plenty in farming j 
 which any man who studies it may well look up to, for 
 it is work for the brain as well as for the brawn. He 
 interprets farm life, and all it needs is interpretation to 
 be seen as the most fascinating business in the world. 
 There is adventure in it, and some money — and what 
 boys need is adventure and some money, Isaiah has 
 made some kind of deal with Clyde which gives him 
 money, now — ^and he^socks it right in the bank. He 
 has quit the baseball team because he is too busy to 
 play. He has undertaken to work out the actual rela- 
 tive profits of labor and capital on all the farms from 
 which the school can get data — ^and most of us are 
 giving our figures in now — ^and Tom says Clyde will 
 be an authority on farm economics in ten years. He 
 is a local authority now ; and prouder of his farm than 
 he ever was of his baseball. 
 
 J 
 
THE BOYS' REVOLT IN FAIRVIEW 85 
 
 He is so proud that he is in a great dilemma. He 
 came over to see Marian the other evening to tell her 
 about it. The Farmers' Exchange Bank at the county 
 seat wants a clerk ; and twenty town boys are after the 
 job. Mr. Avery, the president of the bank, has at- 
 tended several of our meetings in the assembly room 
 of the Fairview school, and has been impressed with 
 Clyde's business ability. So he has offered Clyde the 
 place in the bank. 
 
 "You'll have a great opportunity for advancement," 
 said Mr. Avery to Isaiah and Clyde. "You have the 
 basis of a fundamental understanding of the farming 
 business. More than half our banking business is 
 with farmers, and we do this with nobody on the 
 directory or holding an office in the institution who 
 understands farming. The coming banker in the Com 
 Belt ought to be educated in agricultural economics — 
 come with us and you will find plenty of work and 
 responsibility." 
 
 Clyde thought of the livery stable around the corner 
 where Plug Rafferty once got him a job, and won- 
 dered if it could be really true that he was now offered 
 a place in the great Farmers' Exchange Bank ; but the 
 mahogany desks with the plate-glass tops — ^they were 
 true ; and the elegant Mr. Avery with his well-trimmed 
 beard — ^he was actual ; and Clyde's proud father seated 
 in Mr. Avery's private office, and Clyde himself simi- 
 larly seated — ^they were verities. 
 
 "I tell you, Uncle Abner," said Clyde, the evening 
 when he and Marian came to tell me the wonderful 
 
86 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 news, "I couldn't help thinking of all that Mr. Whelp- 
 ley and the new school have done for me and Saved me 
 from!" 
 
 "You'd never have gone wrong, anyhow!" said 
 Marian. 
 
 "Well," said I, "what are you going to do, Clyde, 
 be a banker, or a farmer?" 
 
 "If you don't mind," said Clyde, blushing, "I think 
 I'll leave that to Marian." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 
 
 REAL book-farmers are pretty scarce — ^and most 
 of them are spurious. The county agent here 
 says to the neighbors that I, Abner Dunham, am the 
 worst mossback in the neighborhood; and proves it, 
 not by that old story of my putting a whip-socket on 
 my automobile, but by what he calls my sneering re- 
 marks about book-farming. Now I hold that you can 
 no more learn to farm out of a book than you can 
 learn to swim, or play baseball, or cut hair in the same 
 way. Doctor Spillman's bulletin on the farming of 
 Chester County, Pennsylvania, admits that the farmers 
 who are guided by the general experience of the farm- 
 ing business in their neighborhoods, rather than by 
 theory, constantly tend to make their methods what 
 they ought to be — or they go broke. And that proves 
 my case. If the scientists and theorists ever come to 
 know all the facts and principles of farming well 
 enough to enable them to formulate designs for correct 
 practises, I suppose they will be able to tell us in books 
 just how to farm. 
 
 The only man we've had in the Fairview neighbor- 
 hood to carry book-farming through as a life-work is 
 JefF Sharpe. To be sure we have had our share of 
 
 87 
 
88 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 back-to-the-landers who thought they could read their 
 way to successful agriculture, and visionary people 
 who thought the rest of us fools ; and themselves pro- 
 ceeded to fool their farms away by doing everything 
 differently; but it wouldn't be fair to charge such 
 cases to book-farming, because, in all probability they 
 would have failed if they had gone into any other 
 business. But Jeff Sharpe is an example of the man 
 who gave book-farming a perfectly fair chance to 
 succeed. 
 
 His full name is Oliver Geoffrey Sharpe, and when 
 he came to the Pup Farm he signed it O. Geoffrey 
 Sharpe. Everybody calls him Jeff, now, however, 
 which shows how civilized he has become. Of course 
 in the meetings of our Cooperative Grain Dealers' 
 Association the wags who deal in lumber and mould- 
 ings have nicknamed him Ogee Sharpe; but his so- 
 briquet at the Ridgeway Pup Farm was "Becky 
 Sharp" as a matter of course, as soon as he made his 
 appearance there. 
 
 My little granddaughter Marian says that Jeff's 
 story is a wonderful romance, and she hopes to put 
 it in a play sometime. This brings up the question. 
 Can there be such a thing as romance in the Com 
 Belt? Marian says it is full of romance — but she is 
 now in the midst of her own first adventure in the 
 realms of Faery — ^you know — ^young Clyde Bohn. I 
 have seen the Com Belt, before it received that name, 
 when the very spirit of mystery and promise blew 
 over it — ^and those things, I have always supposed, are 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 89 
 
 in themselves unwritten romance. I shall never see its 
 like again. Nobody will ever see its like again. I have 
 seen it when the far-off shoulders of its low hills were 
 blue with violets, or when its anemones were pushing 
 their woolly heads up through the gray grasses under 
 grayer skies; seen it as an ocean whose swells were 
 hills and whose ripples were the shadows on crinkling 
 grasses spreading away as far as the eye could see, 
 unmarred by homestead or stack; I have lived with the 
 wild fowl now gone, the wolves, the gophers, the 
 badgers, and the smooth, harmless snakes; seen the 
 clouds flying over this wonderful prairie, €ach fol- 
 lowed over the knolls by its double in shadow ; watched 
 the tornado go ravening over it seeking prey where 
 none was found; breasted the' blizzards; heard the tri- 
 umphant chorus of all the prairie brooks as they rip- 
 pled out of the patchy snows in the spring sunlight 
 down to the swales, and off with the roaring creeks to 
 the river — and then I have seen the black burnt sod 
 shimmer into the delicate green of April, to pass' 
 through every shade of pink, yellow, gold, gray and 
 brown, until the tumble-weeds chased one another from 
 hillock to hollow in the autumn like stampeded brown 
 sheep. I would give anjrthing to see it again; but I 
 never can, for the world does not hold its like. 
 
 I have seen all this green sod broken by the plow; 
 and where I saw a desert, I now see a teeming empire 
 of men and women, the best, I am persuaded, in 
 America. All in my life. Perhaps there is no romance 
 in that, but there is something mighty. I have read a 
 
90 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 book called "A Foreign Tour at Home," by an elderly 
 New Englander, who not many years ago for the first 
 time went across the continent to California, and 
 could see nothing but what seemed to him rather 
 squalid and dismal in the Corn Belt. He didn't like 
 our endless succession of farms, each with a house of 
 no particular style of architecture, and tower-like 
 silos, and big red barns. The roads were not good, 
 they were all distinctly straight, and ran north and 
 south or east and west. The whole country seemed un- 
 kempt, to him — ^not realizing how much there is of it 
 to be kempt and how few people there are per square 
 mile to kemb it. To him there was no romance or 
 beauty in the groves we planted in the prairie and 
 which now stand tall and green about the farmsteads, 
 nor in the long rows of waving com, or the sleek herds 
 of cows and the feed-yards peopled with fat steers di- 
 viding their time between alfalfa in the racks and 
 corn in the troughs, with an occasional nibble at the 
 lush blue-grass in the pastures. Well, maybe there isn't 
 any beauty in it, but it looks good to us. I honestly 
 believe that this New Englander, who is a literary 
 man, was repelled from the Corn Belt's beauties be- 
 cause of the straight lines, the absence of great areas 
 wasted in the grounds of gentlemen — in short, because 
 it didn't look like England. We get most of our liter- 
 ary farming from British writers. 
 
 And in that opinion Mr. O. Geoffrey Sharpe would 
 have agreed with him when he arrived at the Pup 
 Farm. He was twenty-five or so, and had been shipped 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 91 
 
 over from that same England by a family who couldn't 
 for their lives find a place for him there. If we are to 
 understand young Sharpe, we must know what the 
 Pup Farm was — and, in my opinion, a real writer 
 could make more of a story of that than of Jeff's ca- 
 reer. If Dickens of his Dotheboys Hall and its Mr. 
 Squeers made immortal literature, I should think a 
 writer who knew his business could do as well with 
 Major Ridgeway and his Pup Farm — even if it was 
 in the Corn Belt. 
 
 Major Ridgeway was an Englishman who came in 
 about the time of the German invasion in the Mid- 
 West, bought a goodish tract of land in the western 
 part of the Wheeler's Crossroads District, and went 
 into farming. He built a house on the plan, I am told, 
 of an English country home, though probably not so 
 fine; but it was a good deal too much house for the 
 farm. It made the overhead too big for profits. The 
 major was a pompous, red-whiskered, toppy chap who 
 came over the sea expecting to found an estate, a 
 family line, and all the rest of it on the European 
 plan. A considerable number of men did the same 
 thing in the sixties. I can recall now the cases of Doc- 
 tor Knopf, a German professor; Conrad Schwager- 
 mann, a German landowner, who sold out and came; 
 Thomas O'Hara, an Irish squire; and a Frenchman 
 named Foumier who came from France to Quebec and 
 then to this country. They all failed, because land was 
 plenty, and Americans would not work for these gen- 
 try for less than they could earn working for them- 
 
92 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 selves ; and if the gentry paid the scale, they could, as 
 a matter of course make no profits ; since when a man 
 gets all he makes there is nothing left for his employer. 
 In the same wave of immigration there came thou- 
 sands of poverty-stricken peasants who succeeded, 
 where the men with capital and aristocratic notions 
 almost always failed. The reason is perfectly obvi- 
 ous. The only way ta succeed was to produce, and the 
 only way to produce was to work ; gentlemen could not 
 work, while peasants could and would. Major Ridge- 
 way occupied himself for several years in finding out 
 that for some reason he was gradually sliding down- 
 hill into bankruptcy by the operation of a farm of the 
 richest land on earth ; and in looking out for a remedy 
 he hit upon the idea of establishing a school in which 
 young Britons might learn American agriculture, and 
 thus avoid the failure which it was beginning to be 
 suspected was likely to overtake the non-working 
 landowner on the cheap lands of the United States. 
 
 This school was the Pup Farm. Of course that was 
 not its correct name, but we never thought of calling 
 it by any other. I happen to know how the name 
 originated, because I remember when the old major 
 established kennels of various kinds of dogs and tried 
 to sell their progeny. Naturally a simple people who 
 called a farm from which pigs were sold a hog farm 
 called Major Ridgeway's estate a Pup Farm; but after 
 he had restocked it with scions of British gentility the 
 name stuck, and, I believe, had something to do with 
 the more or less well-founded popular notion that 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 93 
 
 these young men each represented a skeleton in the 
 closet of a rich and possibly titled British family. So, 
 you see we despised Ridgeway's Pups; and they cer- 
 tainly looked down on us, whether they did us the 
 honor of concerning themselves so far as to despise us 
 or not. And Jeff Sharpe was one of Ridgeway's Pups. 
 
 Alice Bailey, a niece of mine, was a country school- 
 teacher in those days, and was keeping the Wheeler 
 Crossroads School. The Ridgeway farm and a school 
 section were in that district, and neither of these were 
 the homes of children : so her school was small — only 
 half a dozen pupils, and often none at all. In going to 
 and from school she followed a road which ran over 
 the prairie in those curves which our esthetic eastern 
 critics so much miss; but Ridgeway had begun to 
 break the prairie, and was trying to make the teams on 
 the road follow the section line. You know, however, 
 that it takes two or three years to subdue the soil of 
 an old prairie trail, and Alice still followed the hard 
 path through the Pup Farm fields in spite of the panels 
 of fence which shut off the teams. 
 
 One day as she topped a knoll, she saw one of Major 
 Ridgeway's farm teams in difficulties. The horses 
 were hitched to an old-fashioned square harrow with 
 forty sharp steel teeth, twenty in each section. The 
 driver had attempted to turn the harrow too short, and 
 it had begun to double up. The outer section of the 
 harrow rose in the air and drove the teeth of the other 
 section down into the earth. This lifted the doubletree 
 at one end, and tended to pull the traces under the feet 
 
94 J"HE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 of the inside horse and over the back of the o&ter. The 
 horses had begun to prance — for the major liked spir- 
 ited horses, even for farm work— and Alice, who had 
 been reared on a farm, knew that if they were not 
 turned back so as to let the harrow straighten out, it 
 would be upset, tangle the team up in the gear, and, 
 possibly, if he hung to the Unes, throw the driver on 
 the sharp teeth, now sticking out instead of down ; or 
 if he let them go, the runaway horses would almost 
 certainly jerk the harrow upon themselves and be torn 
 as by bayonets. The driver seemed utterly incompe- 
 tent to straighten out the tangle, which was fast be- 
 coming really dangerous; so Alice ran to the horses' 
 bits, turned them sharply to the right and eased them 
 forward. The harrow straightened, the right-hand 
 section coming down with a sharp chop, and when 
 Alice had quieted the horses and looked back, she saw 
 the driver lifting the harrow to release his foot. In- 
 stead of keeping out of the way, as any farmer would 
 have done he had stood helplessly gazing at the girl 
 who was so skilfully getting him out of his scrape — 
 and had got a steel spike three-quarters of an inch 
 thick right through the flat part of his foot. 
 
 "Thank you very much," said he, lifting his hat. 
 **Very stupid of me to do that. I'm a beastly duffer, 
 you know, at this work !'* 
 
 "You're hurt !" she exclaimed, looking at the blood 
 gushing up out of his boot. "Oh, you're awfully hurt !" 
 
 "Oh, not at all I assure you," he replied — and keeled 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 95 
 
 over in the dirt. A spike through the foot will put a 
 man out as soon as anything I know of. 
 
 Alice tied the team to a wagon standing near, 
 dragged the fool Englishman to a clean, hard spot in 
 the old road, with a tussock of grass for a pillow, ran 
 back to the schoolhouse for water and some remedies 
 she kept there in case any of the children should get 
 hurt, ran back, doused his face with the water and 
 brought him to; and then, against his weak protests, 
 took off his boot and sock, cleansed the woimd of dirt 
 V?ith water and spirits of camphor, wrapped it up with 
 torn linen which she evolved from the surrounding 
 circumstances, flooded it with tincture of arnica, put 
 on an outer covering made of a grain bag which she 
 found in the wagon, helped him to the spring seat, 
 threw into the wagon his boot and sock, drove him to 
 the Lodge, as they called the Pup Farm, and delivered 
 him to Major Ridgewa/s man Pulver; who notified 
 the major, I suppose, that young Sharpe, who had just 
 come in, had already rendered the major liable on his 
 contract to give his pupils medical attention as a part 
 of the quid pro quo for the seventy-five pounds a year 
 each which he charged for their board and tuition. 
 
 This was "Becky's" introduction to the Pup Farm's 
 curriculum. Major Ridgeway's course of study con- 
 sisted of family prayers every morning, to keep his 
 contract for religious and moral surroundings; and 
 for the rest of the day the boys were supposed to ab- 
 sorb agriculture from the plow-handle, the lines of the 
 
96 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 farm harness, curry-combs, the teats of cows, and other 
 practical farm contacts. It was exactly like Mr. 
 Squeers' plan of making his boys work in the grounds 
 and garden; with no pretense, however, on the part of 
 Major Ridgeway in the direction of book or labora- 
 tory study. ^ 
 
 We farmers envied the major at first his shrewdness 
 in actually obtaining nearly four hundred dollars cash, 
 apiece, annually, for keeping his hands, while the rest 
 had not only to keep them but also to pay them for their 
 work. It looked to us as if he had the southern slave- 
 holders beaten in the labor market by exactly seventy- 
 five pounds a year per head. But we did not understand 
 the Pups. Britons never can be slaves — and these chaps 
 were typical Britons. They averaged pretty high in 
 wildness. They certainly gave the county seat a rich 
 carmine tint; for while all of them were supposed to be 
 in exile, some for their sins, and others because their 
 families could not afford to give them a financial start 
 in England, they all had more money than any of us 
 possessed. Their remittances were struggled for by the 
 saloons, and gambled for by our local tinhorns. The 
 Farmers' Saloon changed its name to the House of 
 Lords, and Jimmie Preston, once a British soldier, 
 was made its manager by the German brewers who 
 owned it. On the other side of the street Julius Hoff- 
 man, a German saloon keeper, who owned his own 
 place, renamed it The Senate, to cater to the American 
 trade. Our local poker-players taught the Britons 
 their peculiar art ; to which they took much more nat- 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 97 
 
 urally than to American agriculture at the Pup Farm. 
 The major found it impossible to enforce discipline; 
 and it took as much effort to get a day's work out of 
 the Pups as the labor was worth. He got his yearly 
 fees for keeping them, and he had the questionable 
 pleasure of their company when they were at the 
 Lodge, and that is about all. 
 
 Jeff was pretty nearly as wild as any of them. There 
 was no studying to be done, and he sensed the graft 
 there was for the major in his work; and what was 
 there for him to do but join the gang? He and a 
 young fellow named Wyatt — nicknamed "Puffin"— 
 were the most industrious of the crowd, however. 
 "Puffin," through a series of tinexpected deaths in his 
 family, became rich and succeeded to a title, and for a 
 long time before his death sat in the British House of 
 Lords, where he made only one speech. It was on the 
 subject of "The Influence of the Settlement of the 
 Prairie States of America on British Agriculture." 
 It made Lord Wyatt an authority on conditions pre- 
 vailing in American farming; and he had the good 
 sense not to try speaking on anything else. He and 
 "Becky" worked off and on, imtil something hap- 
 pened in England which cut off Jeff's remittances. He 
 had been cleaned out at poker just after receiving his 
 last check, and was dead broke. Major Ridgeway 
 immediately kicked him out, and in view of the fact 
 that the check gambled away had contained the ma- 
 jor's "tuition" money, this was only business. At that, 
 Jeff was no worse off than the rest of us, since he 
 
98 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 had his health, his two hands, and a good education. It 
 was only his bringing up that made it seem to him that 
 he faced starvation. 
 
 He and Alice had cultivated by carefully-arranged 
 accidents a sort of clandestine acquaintance ever since 
 the harrow accident. She was fond of birds ; and Jeff 
 had made a collection of nests in England, and knew 
 the names of more birds than Alice did; so they used 
 to walk about the country, generally accompanied by 
 one or two of the pupils of her school, looking at birds 
 with Jeff's opera glasses, and looking them up in a 
 book which Jeff procured. He also showed her how 
 to make an herbarium. These accomplishments on his 
 part seemed to her, I have no doubt, perfectly wonder- 
 ful things; for she was only an ignorant frontier 
 school-teacher whose easy examination in the common 
 branches had been none too easy for her. Yet, notwith- 
 standing Jeff's marvelous knowledge of the world, of 
 birds and plants, and in spite of his nice manners ; Alice 
 knew that she should not go about with him. For he 
 was a wicked, gambling, roistering fellow, who was 
 supposed to be either a fugitive from justice, or the il- 
 legitimate son of some Englishman who had shipped 
 him to get rid of him. He never spoke of his family. 
 It was hard to induce him to speak of himself. He 
 treated her beautifully, and to walk about with him 
 was just like reading a book, but he was certainly not 
 a man to whom she could stoop. Besides, he was a 
 foreigner, and his manner of mouthing his English 
 would make him the laughing-stock of any gathering 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 99 
 
 of the sort of people she knew ; and — ^well, there was 
 no use in even thinking about it. And what was "it" 
 anyhow ? There was no "it." 
 
 When Jeff was kicked off the Pup Farm Major 
 Ridgeway sent his luggage to the station and took a 
 check for it of the station agent. When this check was 
 delivered to Jeff it constituted a receipt in full from the 
 Sharpe family to Major Ridgeway for one son received 
 in a damaged condition and abandoned in similar state. 
 Jeff told the major he would walk to town. He wanted 
 to think. He had no money with which to pay his fare 
 to England or anywhere else. He had no skill in any- 
 thing but shooting, tennis, polo, and various games of 
 chance-— and in the latter his skill was in no way equal 
 to his enthusiasm. What should he do ? He had been 
 sent off by his family because he was wild and they 
 couldn't afford the luxury of keeping him — and Major 
 Ridgewa/s correspondence did seem to show that 
 Geoffrey might easily win a competence in America in 
 a few years. Besides, it saved the family's face to be 
 able to tell their friends that Geoffrey had gone 
 rawnching in America where the millionaires are man- 
 ufactured. In a country overcrowded with folks too 
 good to work, the Sharpes are really not to be blamed, 
 I suppose. The boy was bitter, and ashamed, and 
 miserable, and perplexed and in despair. He wanted 
 to walk to town and think — ^and he may have been 
 aware of the fact that the road to town took him by 
 Alice Bailey's schoolhouse. 
 
 Anyhow, it did, and when he had passed it a few 
 
100 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 rods he stopped and sat for a while on a boulder which 
 some old glacier had dropped there. His heart was 
 beating rather high, and his hands were trembling. He 
 was thirsty, too ; and he knew that Alice always kept 
 a tin pail of water on a bench in the schoolroom. 
 Would she give him to drink ? He would ask — and he 
 walked up to the outer door, which was open, and 
 through the entry-hall to the inner one which was 
 closed. There was no sound within, no hum of recita- 
 tion, no shuffling of feet, no piping voices pleading 
 "Please, kin I leave my seat?" or "Please, may I 
 speak?" There was only the droning hum coming 
 down through the open hatch leading -up into the raf- 
 tered attic of the mud-wasps plying their masonry on 
 the beams. He listened long, and as he listened he 
 looked repeatedly at his valuable English gold watch. 
 It was noon, and there should have been the restless 
 racket which precedes the letting out of school — ^but 
 he could hear nothing. So he gently opened the door 
 and looked in. 
 
 It was one of those days, not so very rare, when 
 none of Alice's pupils had come. She was alone at her 
 cheap pine desk only four or five feet before him, 
 facing the array of empty seats and the shabby little 
 schoolroom. Or, she would have been facing them if 
 she had not had her head bowed on a big book lying 
 on the desk — a book which Jeff recognized as the 
 herbarium. He saw that she was crying; and when 
 she raised her head at the sound of the creaking door, 
 her face was streaming with tears. 
 
 "I say!" he stammered. "I thought, you know — " 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 101 
 
 "Oh," she cried, "they said you'd gone back to Eng- 
 land!" 
 
 I have no idea what took place then, save that Alice 
 and Jeff ate Alice's lunch — ^and that when she had con- 
 scientiously remained at her post until three, they 
 walked four miles over to my farm, and Alice intro- 
 duced Jeff as a young friend of hers who wanted a job 
 as a farm hand. When my wife found that he was one 
 of the Ridgeway Pups, she wanted me to send him 
 packing for Alice's sake; but I convinced her that we 
 couldn't send the fellow away hungry; and that in 
 common decency we'd have to keep him over night and 
 take him to town the next day. She saw the justice of 
 this, and by the time Jeff had eaten her meat and her 
 salt, and spent half an hour in converse with her and 
 Alice, she was for giving him a chance. She was 
 even willing to let him take a horse and buggy and 
 drive Alice back to her boarding place. 
 
 I don't see how it is possible for an Englishman to 
 be poor as a permanent thing, they have so many rich 
 aunts. This I know, that the ones domesticated among 
 us through the Ridgeway Pup Farm — ^and twenty or 
 thirty must have become permanencies — seemed al- 
 ways to be getting legacies from aunts. Jeff hadn't been 
 working for me three months — ^not long enough to have 
 become even a passable hand, green as he was — ^when 
 he got a legacy from an aunt. It amounted to four or 
 five thousand dollars. He finished his month's work, so 
 as to give me a chance to get another hand, and the next 
 thing we heard we were asked to go to the little Epis- 
 
102 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 copal rectory In the county seat to see him married to 
 Alice. At the wedding he told my wife and me that he 
 had bought the farm on which Conrad Schwagermann, 
 the German gentleman mentioned a while ago, had 
 achieved bankruptcy. The bank had bought it in at 
 sheriff's sale, and sold it to Jeff Sharpe. I suspect 
 that they did this to prevent Jeff's legacy from getting 
 across the county line. 
 
 "Why," said I, "you didn't have money enough to 
 pay for that big farm !" 
 
 "No," said he, "I had barely enough to pay for the 
 equipment. I owe for the whole bally farm. But 
 I think we can make it go, don't you know !" 
 
 I told him the farm was too big for him; that he 
 should have bought only what he could pay for; but 
 he was amazingly cheerful, and so was Alice. 
 
 "Really, you know," said he in that style of talk that 
 they call the "Haw-Haw Englishman" style up in 
 Western Canada — "Really, you know, I'm quite sure 
 I can organize other men's labor to more advantage 
 than I can my own. I'm quite an ass at manual labor, 
 personally, don't you know !" 
 
 Neither of them knew much farming; but they 
 tackled the proposition with all the assurance of youth. 
 Jeff was looked down on by the surrounding farmers 
 because he was one of Ridgeway's Pups, even while 
 they recc^ized the fact that a man who knew Latin 
 and French and played the flute — even though he 
 played it wretchedly — was in many ways their superior. 
 They resented his superiority. The women assumed 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 103 
 
 the pose toward Alice that she had thrown herself 
 away; and that certainly she couldn't expect a man of 
 Jeff's history to be true to her. So Jeff and Alice re- 
 tired from circulation. They became a sort of dual 
 hermit. Knowing nothing of farming as a means of 
 livelihood, and having no relations with any of his 
 neighbors, Jeff was forced to become a book-farmer. 
 He deliberately sat down to learn farming from the 
 printed page. 
 
 Once in two years or so, I suppose, I used to drive 
 in at the old Schwagermann house to see Alice, and 
 take a look about at what was doing in Jeff's farming; 
 and I heard strange things of him all the time. The 
 next winter after they were married the news came 
 to us that Alice and Jeff had moved to East St. Louis. 
 When I heard that they had returned I went over, and 
 learned that Jeff had been working all winter for a 
 commission firm in the stock-yards there. When he 
 asked them for work, they told him they didn't want 
 him; and when he asked if he could work for them for 
 nothing, so as to have a look at the cattle business, 
 they said he might start in on that basis, but they could 
 give no assurances as to the permanency of the job. 
 On this basis he had worked, and worked hard all win- 
 ter loading and unloading steers, driving them from 
 yard to yard, running them up the great chutes to the 
 killing rooms, and especially hanging about the selling 
 yards to get a view of the inside of the business, and 
 acquire the knack of telling a good steer from a poor 
 one, either in the finished state, or as feeders and stock- 
 
104 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 ers. Lighter in purse, but filled with enthusiasm for 
 cattle, he came back with Alice to the Schwagermann 
 farm, and tackled farming on a nine hundred acre 
 scale. 
 
 Everybody laughed at his farming. We saw" his 
 blunders, which were obvious and expensive. We saw 
 fields knobby with clods because he had plowed when 
 it was too wet. We saw great corn-fields made hard 
 to cultivate because of the failure of some new tool 
 which was tried on a big scale instead of a small one. 
 We saw stacks built to carry the rains in instead of 
 out. We saw corn-fields half tended because he tried 
 to do too much with the force of men he had ; but we 
 saw these and his many other bad practises corrected 
 from year to year. One thing struck me in the begin- 
 ning of his farming as probably wiser than the prac- 
 tise of the rest of us; he bought all the strawpiles 
 within two miles of his place — ^which would in those 
 days in the ordinary course of things have been burned 
 to get them off the land — and hauled them to Sharpes- 
 moor, as he called his farm. He had established rela- 
 tions with the cattle men in the stock-yards, so that 
 they let him have credit for all the cattle he wanted ; 
 but most of the stock which he roughed through the 
 winters on the wheat, oats, rye, and barley straw ob- 
 tained for little or nothing, except for the hauling, he 
 picked up in the Fairview neighborhood. His wasn't 
 fancy stock-raising, but it was adapted to the condi- 
 tions at that time. The cattle weren't toppers; but 
 they were kept on cheap feed, and I could see, though 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 105 
 
 he never came near me or any one else except on twisi- 
 ness, that he couldn't be losing money, and I began 
 cautiously to follow his lead. For one thing, I saw that 
 that business of hauling straw and working it up in 
 the barnyards gave Jeff such a supply of manure that 
 in spite of his poor field management — now getting 
 better rapidly — his crops were on the average heavy. 
 He got this theory of the keeping up of soil fertility 
 out of his books. It was a new thing in the Com Belt 
 — ^but we've all learned it since. 
 
 A horse laugh went through the neighborhood when 
 it was learned that Jeff had had a wagon load of dirt 
 shipped from CaHfomia, and had scattered it over a 
 field on which he had sowed some new kind of clover 
 seed. The Clarion, our county paper, had a piece in it 
 telling how Mr. O. Geoffrey Sharpe had shipped in 
 the seed of a new kind of clover, and had sowed a load 
 of the soil it grew in on the Coast, "so it would feel 
 at home in the Mississippi Valley." On being ques- 
 tioned, Mr. Sharpe stated that The Clarion account 
 was "fairly accurate." Then we forgot about the soil 
 shipment in glee at his soaking his seed oats and seed 
 potatoes in "drugs." He was the first man to inocu- 
 late soil for alfalfa in our part of the coimtry — ^that 
 was the soil shipment. I myself lived to pay him two 
 dollars a load for soil from that same field when I saw 
 the sort of crop alfalfa is — ^and nobody laughed at me. 
 He was the first man to act on the scientific fact that 
 leguminous crops must have certain bacteria on their 
 roots, and he shipped that earth to get the bacteria. It 
 
106 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 was a new thing even to the scientists — so don't think 
 the rest of us too shockingly benighted. Jeff was the 
 first man to treat his seed grains for smut — and after 
 about ten years, during which he had oats by the car- 
 load every year without a trace of smut in them, we 
 gradually woke up to the fact that the fool English- 
 man knew something we didn't I noticed from year 
 to year that he had an increasing area in potatoes, and 
 that their foliage remained green until frost, while 
 ours died in August. 
 
 "How do you account for it, Jeff?" I asked him, 
 after two or three years of this. 
 
 "I spray 'em with Paris green for the bugs, and 
 Bordeaux mixture for blight," he answered. 
 
 "I wonder if the spray has anything to do with the 
 vines staying green that way," I mused. 
 
 "Oh, rather!" said Jeff. "I tried it last year, and 
 really there is no doubt of it. The blight is a disease, 
 and the spray kills the germs." 
 
 All this is old stuff now, but it wasn't then. To be 
 sure we had been using the Paris green for potato 
 bugs for many years, and all of us had seen pieces in 
 the farm papers about Bordeaux mixture ; but it looked 
 to us like college-professor dope that the editors put 
 in the papers because the professors sent it to Aem, 
 and they had to have something to fill up with. But it 
 turned out to be a fact that the blight could be con- 
 trolled in that way. Jeff Sharpe grew the best crops 
 of potatoes in the county for five years before his 
 neighbors realized that he had something they hadn't. 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 107 
 
 I have always thought myself as good a cattle feeder 
 as the next man; and I felt a little edgewise at Jeff 
 Sharpe because he never came over and talked with 
 me about feeding. He was married to my niece, and 
 we always' attended their christenings; and it seemed 
 that he really owed it to himself and the family to take 
 my advice once in a while; but he never came near. 
 One Sunday Jeff's yard man came over to join my 
 hired man in a fishing trip — ^I suppose this must have 
 been ten years after Jeff had started in on the Schwag- 
 ermann farm. 
 
 "You'll be back late," I said to Ole, when they told 
 me how far they were going. "Well, stay as late as 
 you please. I'll do the noon and night feeding." 
 
 "You're back numbers," said Jeff's hired man. "We 
 don't have any noon and night feeding." 
 
 "You don't!" I said in some astonishment. "Then 
 you're not finishing the steers this year?" 
 
 "We sure are," said he. "We're finishing some car 
 lots that are going to the International Fat Stock 
 Show." 
 
 "Then what do you mean," said I, "by that balder- 
 dash about not feeding at noon and night?" 
 
 "We feed once a day," he replied as they drove off. 
 "They won't see any more feed until eight o'clock to- 
 morrow morning." 
 
 Now by this time I had begun to have a suspicion 
 that Jeff was not plumb weak-minded. It seemed 
 to me that he was about as smart as any one. This 
 system of feeding, however, was certainly a crazy one. 
 
108 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 as I could plainly see in the light of years of experi- 
 ence; so my wife and I drove over to see Alice that 
 afternoon, only to find that she and Jeff and the chil- 
 dren had gone on a bird-studying and plant-collecting 
 picnic away over beyond Indian Ridge, where there 
 is a swamp, and lots of bobolinlcs and marsh wrens 
 and some natural timber. There was nobody at home 
 but a hired girl — and all those fine steers out there in 
 the yards needing to be fed. In a few days I saw Jeff 
 and asked him about this hired man's tale. It was 
 quite true, he said, that he had adopted the plan of 
 feeding his steers only once a day. He was feeding 
 alfalfa hay and corn-and-cob meal, with plenty of run- 
 ning water in the yards. He hauled in a weighed-out 
 feed of a fixed nutnber of pounds of alfalfa hay per 
 animal each morning, put it in the racks, and let the 
 cattle run to it; also he placed in the troughs all the 
 corn-and-cob meal needed for twenty-four hours, and 
 let the steers eat hay or corn according to their tastes 
 and fancies until it was gone — ^which would be about 
 the time the next feed came in. 
 
 "1 find," said he, "that it cuts down the expense for 
 labor — and that's our chief problem. It makes the men 
 feel better, too, to be able to take a whole day off, as 
 Nels did the Sunday you speak of." 
 
 "But, my boy," said I, "you can't get -gains oh cattle 
 that will pay by any such system of feeding. Nobody 
 does it. Steers have to have fresh feed before them 
 often to keep them eating. You'll lose money — and 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 109 
 
 you can't possibly get quality on your beeves. You'll 
 see when you ship!" 
 
 "I was afraid that might be so," said he, "so last 
 year I divided my cattle into two lots, one of which I 
 fed three times a day, and the other once. I found 
 that there was no difference either in quality or gain." 
 
 "There wasn't!" I was astonished — ^though I might 
 have expected that experimenting of his. "There 
 wasn't!" 
 
 "Well," said Jeff, "the hundred and fifty cattle I 
 fed only once a day made a little better gains, and the 
 buyers liked them a nickel a hundred better — but I 
 think the feeding system had nothing to do with that. 
 There happened to be a few extra good steers in the 
 bunch. Feeding once, twice, or three times a day is a 
 matter of no importance, I think, as feeding, though, 
 of course, you have three times the chances to make 
 mistakes when feeding three times a day." 
 
 "Where did you get this idea ?" I asked after sitting 
 and looking at him for a while. 
 
 "I read it in Henry's Feeds and Feeding" he re- 
 plied. "I never was in another man's feed yard in 
 my life." 
 
 "Out of a book !" said I disgustedly — ^and drove off. 
 And I still feed my cattle twice a day, even though 
 Jeff's steers did make a good record at the Interna- 
 tional. I can not, I simply can not seem to make my- 
 self feel that Jeff's way is not negligent and slovenly, 
 in spite pf the fact that he turns off just as good 
 
110 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 beeves as I 3o. In fact, sometimes the buyers think 
 they dress out a little better; but I shall never be- 
 lieve that the figures from the killing room are correct 
 — and if they are, the reason for his beeves being a 
 shade better than mine probably lies in the fact that 
 he is lueky in getting a better-bred grade of feeders. 
 
 When this little competition in fat cattle began 
 between Jefif and me, I had some doubts on the subject 
 of the importance of blood in beef cattle — remember, 
 that was a long time ago. But Jeff read books on 
 breeds, and his experience at the stock-yards backed 
 up the doctrines in the books, and while the rest of 
 us thought that the whole difference between the scrub 
 and the pure-bred is a matter of feed and shelter, Jeff 
 adopted from his reading the theory that blood is the 
 foundation of good beef, and feed and shelter the 
 means of building the superstructure. Living apart 
 from everybody as he did, he didn't know what we 
 thought, and we were ignorant of his views, and sup- 
 posed that he was buying Angus, Shorthorn and Here- 
 ford steers because of an aristocratic preference for 
 look's and the name of the thing. Now we know a 
 whole lot better. 
 
 All this time — or most of it — ^Jeff might as well 
 have been an absentee landlord for all the good he did 
 to the neighborhood. He saw in the beginning that 
 country life in the Corn Belt was a mighty poor and 
 unorganized thing; and he was used to the caste sys- 
 tem of English country life with its well-marked gra- 
 dations of rank, its richly developed social system, its 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 111 
 
 leisure, its wealth, its culture, its squires and knights, 
 its barons and lords, and underneath all, its peasantry 
 which knew its place. He didn't understand his own 
 place in American life. Here was he, a man who owned 
 his farm, and had a large and good one, gradually be- 
 coming the richest and best-managed in the county; 
 and he couldn't keep domestic help for his wife half 
 the time. As for servants in the British sense, long 
 before he was able to bear the expense of them he saw 
 that they were not to be had at any expense. He was 
 not looked up to in the least because of his proprietor- 
 ship of the farm; and soon got used to having his 
 hired men call him Jeff or an3rthing else they happened 
 to think of. His wife was a girl of the prevailing 
 social type — a large, dark-eyed, imposing woman who 
 worshiped him, and of whom he was very fond; and 
 she was used to our conditions. That's what saved him 
 from the worst friction with his circumstances; to 
 which he adjusted himself by ignoring the rest of the 
 community, and devoting himself to his business and 
 to his growing family, which now included quite a 
 flock of the nicest children I ever saw. 
 
 And it was the children that gradually brought the 
 Sharpe family into touch with the neighborhood. Jeff 
 and Alice began by attempting to teach them them- 
 selves; which was hard enough when there was only 
 little Bailey, but became impossible when the twins, 
 Isabel and Wyatt — ^named after Lord Puffin — ^joined 
 the squad. The others arrived, and at school age they 
 had to be sent to the district school ; and the first time 
 
112 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 ten o£ us ever saw Jeff Sharpe at the same time was 
 when he went to the township school meeting to air 
 his views about school matters. We found that he 
 could talk pretty well, and after the meeting was over 
 he told me that if we had a few more as able men as 
 half a dozen who were present we might do things. 
 
 Then the state college sent an alfalfa demonstra- 
 tion train to the county, and the professor in charge of 
 it asked Jeff to invite the neighbors to Sharpesmoor 
 to see what he had accomplished with alfalfa — which 
 he did, and gave us a mighty good time. The pro- 
 fessor took us from field to field, and asked Jeff to tell 
 us how he did it, and again we found that he was a 
 good talker, and a man of the keenest common sense. 
 We began to forget that he had been one of Ridge- 
 way's Pups — in fact I had about forgotten it long 
 before that. Alice served us tea and sandwiches and 
 cakes, and we had the time of our lives. Two or three 
 editors asked Jeff to write for their papers. He tells 
 me that on that day he began to have a vision of what 
 American rural life is, as he said, "in process of be- 
 coming." 
 
 Well, everybody in the Com Belt knows about O. G. 
 Sharpe now, through his writings for the farm press, 
 and his addresses at meetings of farmers, stockmen, 
 and people interested in rural life. He is on the school 
 board of the Fairview Consolidated Rural School, and 
 teaches classes in feeds and feeding for TotnWhelp- 
 ley. He is a member of Frank Wiggins' congregation 
 in the old Winebrennerian Church, though he also 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 113 
 
 maintains his connection with the Episcopal Churdi, 
 in the county seat. There is no more useful citizen in 
 the county, nor a better farmer — ^if he did dig it all out 
 of books. I have about made up my mind that if the 
 rest of us would study books as he did, and intelligently 
 modify our practise by their doctrines it would be bet- 
 ter for all of us; and Jeff admits that he would have 
 saved himself a lot of mistakes if he had not been too 
 proud to study what we were doing during those first 
 hard years when he and Alice lay awake nights wonder- 
 ing whether or not they would be able to make their 
 payments on the mortgage and prevent foreclosure. 
 For him to have failed would have been a descent into 
 the pit; for he had no friends then. 
 
 All this time, Alice was wondering whether or not 
 there was anything wrong with Jeff's history "at 
 home" as he called England, though he had long since 
 become an American citizen — and could be elected to 
 county oflSce if he wzmted to be — ^the farmers would see 
 to that. As for the city vote, his being a director in 
 the Farmers' Exchange Bank would help some, I'm 
 sure, Alice never asked him about his people, and he 
 never told her, except that they were "typical middle- 
 class English people." Now to Alice this didn't mean 
 much; but at what it did mean to her she was not much 
 overjoyed. To her, upper-class people were those who 
 were industrious and honest, and not really poor; but a 
 very poor person who was honest and very intellectual, 
 like Mrs. Doctor Asbury at the county seat, was cer- 
 tainly "upper class." As for other classes, there was 
 
114 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 the lower class, consisting of the worthless, criminal, 
 and immoral of society. Old Dan Fifer, who was very 
 rich, but lived a life of open immorality, and made his 
 money as a loan shark, was certainly, to Alice's mind, 
 a member of the lower classes, though his ancestors 
 came over in the Mayflower. A middle-class person, 
 she reasoned, must be somewhere in between these; 
 and that certainly was nothing to be proud of. Prob- 
 ably Geoflfrey had done the only proper thing when 
 he cut himself off from that middle-class family ; since 
 he was now indisputably upper class — ^honest, able, and 
 a successful farmer, respected by all. 
 
 Therefore, Alice was not lifted to any great spiritual 
 height when the family in England began to write Jeff. 
 He began to speak, too, of changes in the family which 
 seemed to make it necessary for him to go back. They 
 wanted his advice on the family business. Evidently, 
 Alice told my wife, they had found out that Jeff was 
 doing well and wanted to tag along after him as 
 he ascended the hill. 
 
 They never sent any word to Alice, nor asked for 
 her picture, nor the children's. So far as Alice knew, 
 Jeff's family were not aware of her existence — ^which, 
 as a matter of fact, they were not. Jeff admitted to 
 me that for a year or so the exchanges of letters were 
 very cold and businesslike. If the family had become 
 wealthy again, as they seemed to have done, Jeff felt 
 that it was their affair. They had inferred that he 
 could swim in America, and never looked to see 
 whether or not he might not be sinking. The old 
 
 I 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 115 
 
 estrangement had solidified with time in Jeff's mind; 
 and he refused to tell them about his family, or tell the 
 family about them — ^he was too proud and embittered 
 at first ; and after all these years, he could not approach 
 the subject without embarrassment. He felt a barrier 
 between him and the explanations he should have 
 made ; and finally, when it became absolutely necessary, 
 he packed up Alice and all the children, and sailed for 
 England without explanations. 
 
 Alice came over to consult with her Aunt Lucy about 
 the clothes she should wear. "Of course," said she, 
 "Jeff's people being only middle-class folks, we shan't 
 be in need of much in the way of clothes. I can't lug a 
 lot of dresses about the world. Do you suppose I shall 
 need any evening dresses?" 
 
 "No-o-o," advised my wife, "I should think not. 
 Just take what street and traveling dresses you will 
 need; and if you are invited out, that broadcloth suit 
 with the silk waist that you wore to the meeting of 
 the International Congress of Farm Women will be 
 plenty good enough." 
 
 Well, you ought to read the letter Alice wrote her 
 aunt after she got to England. I think I'll give you 
 some of it. 
 
 "If I ever wanted to cuff anybody's ears," wrote she, 
 "I want to do it to Jeff's, as he sits before me now — 
 but they are so red with embarrassment at the pickle 
 he put me in that I shall have to forgive him. Why he 
 has deceived me all these years I have no idea; and 
 why he let me come so unprepared and to be so humili- 
 
116 lThe fairview idea 
 
 ated will always be a mysta-y. He says that fie couldn't 
 explain everything, and he really didn't see the per- 
 fectly impossible situation into which he was steering 
 me. I thought I should die 1" 
 
 "I told Alice," said my wife, looking up from the 
 letter, "that she was foolish; to marry without knowing 
 what she was marrying into! Well, thank goodness 
 they're in England — ^and Jeff's certainly pure gold, 
 even though his folks may be the professional horse- 
 thieves of the British Isles!" 
 
 "I won't tell you about London, or Liverpool, be- 
 cause I have so much else to tell. We went southwest, 
 or southeast, from London two or three hours by train, 
 and got off at the prettiest little villeige you ever saw 
 — reminds me of the picture of Stratford-on-Avon, 
 only different — ^and were met at the station by a 
 man with a carriage — a. big, roomy carriage — ^but he 
 seemed a little dismayed by the number of children. 
 He seemed glad to see Geoff; and I could see that 
 they were acquainted, because he called Geoff 'Mr. 
 Geoffrey,' and Geoff called him 'Dawson' ; and told him 
 that Master Bailey would ride in the cart with the 
 luggage, and we'd find room for the rest in the car- 
 riage. I thought it funny that none of the family 
 came, and that they had sent a hack for us ; but I have 
 learned since not to be surprised. We drove along the 
 prettiest roads I ever saw, and between the greenest 
 fields, and finally turned in at a huge g^te into a park, 
 with a great house like a picture in it. 
 
 " 'This is Oakhurst Park, my dear,' said Geoff. 
 
 " 'A very pretty park, too,' said I. 'Do your folks 
 live near it?' 
 
ROMANCE of: A BOOK-FARMER 117. 
 
 " 'Yes !' said Geoff, 'in point of fact, they live — ' 
 And before he got through humming and hawing we 
 had driven up to the door, a liveried servant had 
 opened it, little Bailey had arrived in the cart and 
 we were all ushered into that fine house with aS much 
 ceremony as if it had been the governor's recej^tion! 
 
 "Well, Aunt Lucy, that fine house is Geoff's old 
 home; and I can understand why he was so miserable 
 many years ago; and I can see that he is easily com- 
 forted when he tells me that I am the only thing that 
 made it possible for him to get used to living as we 
 used to live when we were younger. And his people 
 are perfectly lovely! I find that middle class here 
 takes in some pretty way-up people — it is the class just 
 below the aristocracy in social standing. I have been 
 the most foolish and ignorant woman in the world! 
 But I must tell you about my clothes. When we ar- 
 rived, and had been welcomed with all due warmth by 
 the family — ^and that's not any too warm — ^we were 
 assigned our rooms — such beautiful old rooms! — ^and 
 told by the maid — ^they keep a lot of servants — I have 
 counted ten and am finding new ones all the time — ^the 
 time of the dinner hour. I went down in that suit that 
 you and I agreed would be plenty good enough — ^and 
 found a lot of guests, and every man, including Geoff, 
 in evening dress, and every woman oi course ! I felt 
 like death. I will say this for them, they never seemed 
 to notice it. 
 
 "After dinner, Geoff's mother came up to see me, 
 and after we had talked a while, I said, 'Mrs. Sharpe* 
 (I wouldn't for the world have called her anjrthing 
 else yet), 'Mrs. Sharpe, I have an explanation and a 
 request to make of you.' 
 
 **'Yes, my deah,' said she, and I began to feel 
 friendly tow^vd her. 
 
118 THE FAIRVIEW tDEA 
 
 " 'My husband,' said I, 'has never told me anything 
 about his family. I inferred, however, that they were 
 not — ^not the sort of people who live in this style.' 
 
 " 'Quite so !' she said. 'Geoff is like that. No swank, 
 you know.' 
 
 " 'Well,' said I, 'I wish he had had a little more 
 swank. If he had not treated me in this shabby way, 
 I'd have brought clothes with me. I shall never for- 
 give him !' 
 
 " 'Oh, yes, you will, my deah,' said she. 'I hope 
 you'll never have anything worse to forgive. All the 
 Sharpes are like that. Explanations and descriptions 
 bore them, and they let every one play off his own 
 bat — ^and we women who are married to them are 
 obliged to forgive their impassivity.' 
 
 "She said this, patting me on the arm — and I burst 
 into tears. I will say this for her, that she helped me 
 very tactfully; and then said, 'My deah, your ex- 
 planation is entirely adequate. I think you said you 
 had a request also ?' 
 
 " 'It is this,' said I. 'Please let me keep my room, 
 until you can take me to a shop, and help me select 
 some clothes.' 
 
 " 'My deah,' said she, 'nothing can give an elderly 
 woman more pleasure than to help buy clothes for a 
 young and beautiful one of whom she feels sure she is 
 going to be very fond !' 
 
 "And then I said, 'Thank you. Mother!' 
 
 " 'We'll run down to London in the morning,' said 
 she." 
 
 Alice is bent on moving to England, where Geoff's 
 interests are about as large as here, even though he is 
 a younger son ; but Geoff has become interested in our 
 neighborhood affairs, and refuses to go. The fact is. 
 
ROMANCE OF A BOOK-FARMER 119 
 
 he is hopelessly Americanized. He says that the gov- 
 erness system in vogue in England for the education 
 of girls is something deadly, as compared with the 
 privileges we can ^ve them here. 
 
 "And then. Uncle Abner," said he — ^it was the first 
 time he ever called me anything but Mr. Dunham — "I 
 feel that the rural life of England is more beautiful 
 than sound; and it is a decaying thing. Ours is just 
 beginning to find itself — in most places it is not even 
 doing that. I can't forego the privilege you know, of 
 having a hand in molding it while it is begiiming, so 
 to speak. Over there life takes note of what is past. 
 Here we can face what is to come, and can build up a 
 country life in which science, art, music, and democ- 
 racy will all be fused into the best the world has seen. 
 I'm going to stay in it ; and keep my sons and daugh- 
 ters in and for it !" 
 
 And then he blushed, and said, "Let's have a look at 
 the steers!" 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 
 
 I GET such letters occasionally — ^and they make me 
 sick. They give me a sharp, darting, spasmodic 
 pain. The last one of the sort came from the head of 
 a Social Center Conference in the East. "Dear Mr. 
 Dunham," it reads, "The work done in your commu- 
 nity by yoursel;f, the Reverend Frank Wiggins and 
 Doctor Thomas Whelpley is, I know, very important, 
 and I would like to know more about it. You have the 
 most completely socialized rural community in Amer- 
 ica — " and more of that sort of rot. 
 
 tWe are not a socialistic community — ^nor anarch- 
 istic, either. iWe had a few populist votes in the era 
 of General Weaver, and there is one Socialist vote 
 almost every presidential election, and I think I know 
 who casts it; but I would no more accuse him of it 
 without better evidence than I possess than I would 
 without proof indict him for body-snatching. ^That's 
 my attitude, and our attitude, and it makes us rather 
 furious to be accused of Socialism or anything that 
 sounds like it. We are a solid farming community in 
 the Com Belt, with lands worth from a hundred and 
 fifty to two hundred dollars an acre, and having hard 
 
 120 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 121 
 
 worlc to make both ends meet on that basis of capi- 
 talization. 
 
 I have told you that a great many of our older 
 famihes have abandoned their farms for city life and 
 turned them over to tenants, and the fight we have 
 been making to keep our neighborhood life from 
 absolutely going to pot on account of the mania for 
 retiring from Fairview. I have given a part of the 
 history of the twentieth-century rural church pioneer- 
 ing of Daisy and Frank Wiggins in giving us a new 
 kind of country church. As for the individual referred 
 to in this letter as "Doctor Thomas Whelpley," he is 
 not a doctor of anything, nor a Thomas either. His 
 full name is Tom Whelpley, and he is the Fairview 
 District's New Hired Man. Now let us see how much 
 his work, and Frank Wiggins', and Daisy's — I have 
 done nothing, as any of them will tell you, but, in my 
 mossback way, try to have whip-sockets put on the 
 motor-car of progress — ^justifies this epithet of "a so- 
 cialized community." 
 
 Just another word on this accusation that we have 
 been doing something revolutionary and socialistic in 
 our neighborhood : As a matter of fact, what have we 
 been doing? We have been applying the old New 
 England public school and town meeting idea to our 
 present-day life. We brought the best of New England 
 to the Com Belt in prairie schooners before the great 
 Civil War. We've got the old machine on our hands. 
 Is it socialistic to repair it? 
 
 Frank Wiggins just dropped in and looked over 
 
122 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 what I have written, and smiled in that quiet way of 
 his at what he calls my heat in the matter. "Why so 
 hot, little man?" said he, quoting somebody, and not 
 meaning any slur. "Why object to the name of social- 
 ism if the thing itself suits you ?" 
 
 But do you suppose I am going to sit down tamely 
 and accept statements which will give that one Social- 
 ist voted in the whole township the laugh on me ? Not 
 if this court knows itself, and it thinks it does. 
 
 Why, our good luck in getting Tom Whelpley as 
 the Neighborhood Hired Man is the direct result of 
 our conservatism. Frank Wiggins reads more farm 
 papers than any other farmer in the district; and if he 
 were consistent would take his text on Sunday from 
 the writings of Dean. Henry, or Liberty Bailey, or Joe 
 Wing, or Henry Wallace, or Doctor Hopkins, or Gov- 
 ernor Hoard, rather than from the Bible. I told him 
 so one day, and the next Sunday, just to show me that 
 the Bible is an agricultural book he preached from 
 Isaiah 7:25: "And on all hills that shall be digged 
 with the mattock, there shall not come thither the fear 
 of briers and thorns: but it shall be for the sending 
 forth of oxen, and for the treading of lesser cattle." 
 It was a plea for the cattle-feeding business as a re-r 
 ligious function! The Reverend Frank always comes 
 back at us. 
 
 He is possessed of an apostolic foolhardingss, a holy 
 boldness which would have carried him successfully 
 to the stake in an earlier day ; and is always trying to 
 force on us old farmers his views as to new ways of 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 123 
 
 doing our business; but we don't mind, and when he 
 goes too far we turn him down cold. He always 
 means well, and usually we humor him. When the 
 idea became popular of hayjng the Department at 
 Washington and the state college of agriculture co- 
 operate in sending experts into the various counties to 
 do what Doctor Spillman calls demonstration work, 
 the Reverend Frank wanted our county to have the 
 first one in the North — ^the South had had them for a 
 long time even then. Having chiseled me out of fifteen 
 acres of swamp land and worked Abel Bohn into let- 
 ting him dump the water from it on his land as a water 
 supply, though Abel had refused me the same privi- 
 lege for ten years, Frank said he wanted the advice 
 of a county agent in developing the glebeland of the 
 Fairview Meeting House; and one day he drove into 
 my front yard with a professor of the agriculture col- 
 lege, a man who held himself out as a Department 
 Expert. This man was Tom Whelpley. 
 
 Tom is a Tennessee hill-billy, who walked I don't 
 know how many miles when he was fifteen to a place 
 where they teach the mountain girls and boys in what 
 they call a college — ^but the first thing they taught Tom 
 was the alphabet. He worked his way through this 
 "college," and after he had learned enough knocked 
 off from time to time and taught school. He was a 
 success in the country schools; but when he tried to 
 lift himself "higher" in the teaching profession by city 
 work he fell down. He didn't seem to fit into the 
 angles of the pavements. He was long and weedy to 
 
124 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 look at; and you might spend a hundred dollars on 
 sprucing him up, and he would still look weather- 
 beaten, like a cowboy masquerading as a drug clerk. 
 
 He tells me that he was mightily downcast when the 
 city superintendent suggested that he wasn't tempera- 
 mentally adapted to teaching; because teaching was the 
 only thing he wanted to do. That's one advantage 
 they have in school work down south — ^teaching appar- 
 ently is there still considered a man's work. Tom be- 
 lieved it to be a man's work; and he counted himself, 
 in spite of his troubles with city conditions, the proper 
 man to do it. Doctor Knapp was just opening up his 
 demonstration work in the South ; and one of the pio- 
 neer demonstrators drifted into Tom's neighborhood, 
 and filled Tom with the idea that here was a new and 
 different sort of teaching — ^teaching farmers how to 
 farm. So Tom, in the perfect independence of penni- 
 lessness, made his way to our state agricultural col- 
 lege, which he chose because our Corn-Belt colleges 
 had a high reputation in the South. Not being able 
 to make as much money in Corn-Belt rural school- 
 teaching as he could as a farm hand, he supported him- 
 self largely by farm work, all the time applying the 
 science he got in the college to the practise of the farm 
 — in thought, at least. Of course no good farmer 
 would allow him to carry it much further than the 
 thought stage. And now, that Tom had graduated 
 from the agricultural college with some gray in his 
 hair, this professor and our minister were trying to 
 saw him off on us as a county agent at a salary of 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 125 
 
 eighteen hundred a year, half of which we farmers 
 of the county were expected to pay. And of all men to 
 start such a subscription paper, they had Abel Bohn, 
 who still believed in footwashing as a means of grace 
 in church ! 
 
 Well, of course, we weren't going to fall very sud- 
 denly for anything like that. We hadn't thought it 
 out. We told Wiggins and the professor and Tom 
 Whelpley that we relied on experience as our guide in 
 farming; and didn't take much stock in newfangled 
 ideas. 
 
 "I see you have a patch of rape over there," re- 
 marked Tom. "Why do you grow rape?" 
 
 "Best hog pasture I can grow," I replied. 
 
 "I notice that Mr. Beebe has a patch of alfalfa that 
 looks sort of yellow and spindling," he went on. "I 
 wonder what's the cause of that." 
 
 "It lacks inoculation," I answered. "Wilson and I 
 dug up I guess twenty crowns of it the other day, and 
 didn't find a nodule on a single root." 
 
 'tDo you know," said Tom, "that the first rape 
 sowed in this country was introduced by the experi- 
 menters of the state college not over fifteen years ago, 
 and that you wouldn't have known about it if you had 
 waited to be taught by what you call experience?" 
 
 I didn't answer, not having anything appropriate to 
 say. 
 
 "And did you find out about inoculating alfalfa, and 
 the nodules on the roots by experience?" he went on. 
 "As a matter of fact, when you use such words as 
 
126 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 'nodules,' 'inoculation,' and 'bacteria' — and, so far as 
 that's concerned, the word 'crown,' too — ^you're talking 
 about things you've read about. Twenty years ago 
 you wouldn't have known what the word meant." 
 
 "I didn't mention 'bacteria,' " I snapped back. 
 
 "No," said Tom, "but you would in a minute; and 
 in half a day you'd be talking about humus and en- 
 silage, and possibly azotobacter. The farmer ought 
 to be ashamed of being the only man who is ashamed 
 of reading about his work — and he has more to read 
 about than the doctor or the lawyer." 
 
 They drove off rather sore because the county agent 
 project for our county was dead. After they got over 
 to the new parsonage that we had just built for Frank 
 and Daisy, they discussed the prospects over their din- 
 ner. 
 
 "We'll put it over yet," Frank said — or something to 
 that broad, general effect. "These people of mine are 
 pretty thick with moss ; but I always get them for any- 
 thing I want." 
 
 "And in the meantime," said Tom, "I've got to get 
 a job. I'm broke. Who wants a hired man around 
 here?" - 
 
 "I do," said Frank. "I can give you three months' 
 work on this little farm of mine, and if my work hap- 
 pens to play out, there's always a job somewhere here- 
 abouts." 
 
 One reason why Frank fell down on this county 
 agent drive was that he had just put through his 
 scheme for a consolidated rural school ; and we had to 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 127 
 
 take him down a peg just on general principles, or give 
 up completely mastered. Daisy was expecting to have a 
 baby; and Frank would have been glad to live in the 
 tar-paper covered tent for ten years, as he did for the 
 first eighteen months of his pastorate, if he could 
 thereby have helped along the establishment of a good 
 graded, consolidated rural school for the coming 
 prodigy. We fixed the gentleman on his martyrdom 
 scheme by building him a cracking good parsonage on 
 the comer of the fifteen acres of swamp glebeland, 
 which by this time he had drained as dry as a garden 
 and was running in celery and other truck, as well as 
 staple crops ; and as for the school project, he had ac- 
 quired so much influence in the adjoining districts of 
 Pleasant Valley, Hickory Grove, Grant Center, Wheel- 
 er's Crossroads and Indian Ridge that he could have 
 voted a township vaudeville palace on us if he had 
 wanted to, I guess, let alone a consolidated rural 
 school with a provision for the transportation of the 
 pupils. So we whirled in with a whoop and boosted 
 for the new school, claiming that we had been for it 
 all the time — ^which as a matter of fact some of us had 
 been. And at this Whelpley crisis the new building 
 was nearing completion, and we were pleased as Punch 
 at having it in the Fairview District and skinning the 
 Indian Ridge folks out of it. We were entitled to it, 
 anyhow, and putting it within a furlong or so of the 
 Fairview Meeting House was a good move in the di- 
 rection of making that place a sort of center. Abel 
 Bohn and I have laid off a few acre lots along the 
 
128 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 road, and I sold two yesterday to John Ackerman, 
 who expects to return to Fairview after having re- 
 tired. And I could sell a couple to Herman Lutz, too, 
 who is dead tired of the life of a retired farmer, but 
 Abel says he saw Herman first, and I think I'll let 
 Abel have him. I just mention these things to show 
 that if you have the right sort of neighborhood facili- 
 ties, and neighborhood life, a man who wants to live 
 an easier life in his old age can retire in the country 
 and keep his eye on the farm while his son or tenant 
 runs it. It will keep the country life alive, and give 
 us nice little hamlets about the churches and school- 
 houses and make for better tenancy and less of it, and 
 give some of us a chance to sell some acre lots. 
 
 Tom Whelpley used to moon about at night in the 
 unfinished schoolhouse. None of us then knew that 
 he had ever been a school-teacher; but the directors 
 were impressed with certain suggestions he made as 
 to the plans for the building. On Sundays he used to 
 get a gang of boys together and scout the country over 
 hunting for insect pests in the grain and fruit and 
 making lists of the birds they saw. I went with him 
 one day, and they identified fifty-four different kinds 
 of birds observed on that trip. The only weapon was 
 an opera glass and a little camera which Tom carried. 
 One day he laid off work and showed some girls how to 
 can corn — it seems that he had made some sort of 
 study of the trick of home canning, and knew some 
 things which the women hadn't learned. He and 
 Frank and Daisy were as thick as thieves ; and if they 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 129 
 
 hadn't been a new sort of bird to the rest of us we 
 would have understood at once that they were up to 
 something. As it was we thought it was only their 
 eccentricities, and peacefully went to sleep at the 
 switch. 
 
 I own I thought it looked like politics when Tom 
 WhelpleyTiooked up with Adolph Tulp, brother of 
 Henry Tulp, a member of the board of directors from 
 over in Pleasant Valley, at the other end of the new 
 consolidated district. Adolph had drifted into the 
 neighborhood, drunk and sick and down and out six 
 months before; and was now the chief problem of 
 Henry's folks. He was a sort of universal genius, but 
 specialized in booze. He talked broken German- 
 American and when he was sober was a fellow one 
 liked to talk with. He had been a sailor, a soldier, a 
 carpenter, and was a good horse-shoer — ^learned that 
 in the German army; but his chief amusement was 
 talking against the Imperial German government and 
 the making of pretty little things of iron, either with a 
 lathe or a hammer. The minister's people took him in 
 one night when he was wallowing around in the church- 
 yard; and I understand was that bad with the horrors 
 that he tried to kill himself. He was a poor miserable 
 creature, and just the sort of case Daisy was prone to 
 take on for practise in the art of nursing, which she 
 studied before she married Frank ; and Frank himself, 
 in spite of the fact that he devoted himself to practical 
 farming more than to theology, had great faith in the 
 power of kindness and prayer and religious exaltation 
 
130 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 I 
 
 to set the broken bones of the spirit and reduce dislo- 
 cations in the human intellect. We supposed that 
 all Adolph could possibly be was a case in their spir- 
 itual hospital, and met the situation by adding a little to 
 the preacher's salary to cover these expenses, and the 
 increased family expenses and one thing and another. 
 He was earning the increase all right. Nobody gets 
 an)rthing out of us except on a business basis. 
 
 But when Tom Whelpley began using the new 
 schoolhouse before it was finished as a meeting place 
 for the boys of the neighborhood, and had this Adolph 
 Tulp teaching them how to tie and splice ropes, and 
 other useful tricks, I saw that he was getting pretty 
 solid with Henry Tulp. Tom and the minister and 
 Adolph set up a forge and anvil in a shed the contract- 
 ors had put up for construction work on" the school 
 grounds, and Adolph began teaching the boys to make 
 clevises, sharpen plowshares, temper iron, set tires on 
 the farm-wagons, set shoes on horses, repair machinery 
 generally, and make things of wrought iron that were 
 as pretty as if they had been stamped out by machinery. 
 They are said by some to be even more artistic. Young 
 John Whipple, the son of the other school director, 
 Eph Whipple, of Indian Ridge, made a wrought-iron 
 lantern for the Whipple porch that was highly spoken 
 of at the county fair, where it was exhibited — and Tom 
 Whelpley was solid with Whipple, of course. 
 
 Do you see where all this led to ? When Frank Wig- 
 gins came to me and suggested that Tom Whelpley 
 was the man to be at the head of our new consolidated 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 131 
 
 school, I said, to give myself time to think, "I wonder 
 if he could get a certificate." 
 
 "He's got a state certificate in Tennessee," said he, 
 "and the county superintendent says he will give him 
 a certificate on his credentials." 
 
 I'm far better than a green hand at a political situa- 
 tion, and our public school matters are and always 
 must be political — in the best sense, or the worst sense, 
 or at any rate some sense of the word. I thought of 
 Eph Whipple — ^and I knew he was stuck on Tom 
 Whelpley because of Johnnie's wrought-iron lantern, 
 and the fact that Tom was making a whole lot better 
 boy of Johnnie. I thought of Henry Tulp, the second 
 member of the board, and I knew he'd bet on Tom's 
 ability to do anything under the sun after what he had 
 accomplished in making Adolph Tulp over into what 
 seemed to be a man. Then I thought of myself, and I 
 wondered why I was not strong for Tom as our school- 
 master — ^because I liked the fellow even then. I looked 
 at the Reverend Frank Wiggins — ^and I knew. 
 
 "Frank," said I, "you've got me surrounded; and 
 I'm going to surrender. I'll vote for Whelpley; but I 
 think it's a mistake." 
 
 "Why?" he asked. 
 
 "Because," said I, "it will put a man in ithe school 
 who will just completely blanket, and eclipse, and lay 
 over the work of the church. I'm opposed to him, 
 because I'm for you." 
 
 He looked at me in a kind of wonder, with some 
 tenderness mixed in. 
 
132 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 "Why, Uncle Abner," said he, "I'm surprised at 
 you!" 
 
 "I don't care if you are !" said I. "Tom Whelpley is 
 the same sort of person that you are — only he's a 
 darned sight smarter, I believe; and he knows all you 
 have learned about the life of the people, and a good 
 deal that you never will know. He's a natural rube, 
 and you have acquired only the rube surface. He'll 
 beat you at your own game, and make the school the 
 whole thing. There ain't room in this community for 
 two men like you to work on the same job. I'm proud 
 of our meeting house, and the work you and Daisy have 
 been doing. It's given the neighborhood a good name, 
 not only hereabouts, but all over the country. I don't 
 want to see you undermined — so there !" 
 
 .Well, he just sat down and made me ashamed of 
 myself. The school, he said, was the thing which was 
 at the bottom of ever3^hing. We had built up our 
 church first, but that was a local accident. We had 
 really begun with the second thing first. In any neigh- 
 borhood, he urged, in which there is a full and abound- 
 ing rural life, there will be a chance for the right kind 
 of church so long as religion is the common heritage 
 of all human souls; "And," said he, "if that isn't true 
 I have made a mistake in my profession! Do you 
 think," he went on, "that I regard the agricultural 
 work we have been doing in the church as the best thing 
 we might have done? Not for a minute. We have 
 done it because it needed to be done. We shall always 
 make this church a rural church, run by farmers, min- 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 133 
 
 istered unto by a farmer, smelling of the soil; because 
 it can never be a success unless it is tied to the life of 
 every member by the chords of every-day association; 
 but if I can get Tom Whelpley into the schools, he will 
 take off my hands many things that I have done rather 
 badly, and he will do them well. I need to do other 
 things. Adolph Tulp is not the only person in this com- 
 munity who needs help in matters of the mind and soul. 
 The school is in its nature inclusive. The church is in its 
 nature exclusive. It can not take in all the people. 
 Think of the many who have conscientious scruples 
 against fellowship with the Fairview Meeting House 
 — ^and there is no possible religious organization which 
 could be broader than we are. Any church organiza- 
 tion is likely to follow the way taken by the old 
 Winebrennerian congregation which laid the comer- 
 stone of our building sixty years ago. But the school 
 is a part of the Republic. As long as the nation lasts 
 it will exist. Our church must be supported by the 
 voluntary subscriptions of the people. But the school 
 is supported by taxes. If this mania for moving to 
 town keeps up, and many more farms drift into the 
 hands of year-by-year tenants, our church must, before 
 many years, go the way of thousands of other rural 
 churches. But the school, thank God! will be sup- 
 ported by taxes on the very farms our Fairview land- 
 owners have deserted, and out of the school may be 
 built up a democracy which will decree that no man 
 may own land unless he works it 1" 
 This, of course, was rot; but I didn't think at that 
 
134 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 moment of the arguments against it. I was confronted 
 by a condition, anyhow, and not a theory; and we 
 elected Tom Whelpley Principal of the Fairview Con- 
 solidated School — and that's how he came to be the 
 Neighborhood Hired Man. 
 
 To any one who wants to know what Tom Whelp- 
 ley has done in the ruralization of the Fairview school 
 system, and the giving of life to the society of our 
 countryside, which that eastern saphead calls "social- 
 ization," we are now able to assume high and mighty 
 airs. We may say grandly, "Search, the scriptures !" 
 Or we may adopt the policy of old Colonel Asprey, of 
 our county town, who was a real Colonel in the Civil 
 War, and did great service on the stricken field on 
 many* a hot occasion. Now he follows the humble, if 
 noisy, vocation of the auctioneer. One day a by- 
 stander asked, "How did you get your title, Colond? 
 On the Governor's staff?" The Colonel bayonetted 
 him with a long, cold glare, and said calmly, "You 
 supremely qualified ignorant scum of the earth ! Read 
 the history of your country!" So if we desire to be 
 mean, when any one asks us what Tom Whelpley has 
 done, we refer to magazine articles and bulletins, is- 
 sued by our state government, and by the federal 
 government at Washington, if you please! The time 
 will come, I suppose, when such work will attract no 
 more attention than a good twine binder in operation. 
 But now, the spectacle of an)rthing like the successful 
 application of common sense and constructive ability 
 in rural life in America is nothing less than a marvel. 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 135 
 
 I often tell Tom that he started in at the right time. 
 Ten years from now it will take an all-fired smart man 
 to get as much limelight as he is getting in the same line 
 of business. 
 
 In view of the fact that all that can be put in print 
 about it is available to any one who will send to a pa- 
 ternal government for it, I shall only shadow forth as 
 well as I can the things that aren't in print, and tell 
 the beginnings of it. Tom had the school pretty well 
 organized before he was elected. All he had to do was 
 to perfect, and as the war despatches say, "consolidate 
 the groimd already occupied." He had Adolph Tulp 
 on his hands, and to have abandoned him would have 
 incited a riot among the boys, who liked Adolph to the 
 last kid, because Adolph hates the kaiser, and can do 
 stunts — ^and would probably have driven Adolph back 
 to drink and despair. So Tom and Adolph organized 
 the manual training class into a construction brigade, 
 and built a blacksmith shop on the comer of the lot 
 with lumber bought with money made at a series of en- 
 tertainments in the auditorium of the schoolhouse. 
 
 Here Adolph was installed as teacher of the metal- 
 working end of the manual training course. Most of 
 the blacksmitfaing of the district is done there now; 
 and of this work, the boys perform the lion's share of 
 the labor, and get credits in their course of study. 
 Adolph is allowed to take pay for what he does aside 
 from the instructional work, and is making a nice liv- 
 ing out of it and his small salary; but he insists on re- 
 garding himself as a professional man, and not an 
 
136 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 artisan. He is a teacher, and proud of it — and that 
 shows — I hate to write it — ^that the Grermans have 
 some advantage of us, too, in regarding teaching as a 
 man's work. 
 
 Adolph also is Tom's assistant in the wood-working 
 department, which is accommodated in the basement of 
 the schoolhouse. There isn't much that Adolph can't 
 do, now. He learns faster than any boy, and he car- 
 ries his acquirement^ from school year to school year. 
 He plays the French horn, and is the head of the school 
 orchestra. He drills a company of Boy Scouts. He 
 and the boys plan about every building that goes up in 
 the district. They make architectural and mechanical 
 drawings. They construct models. And all this is 
 done in such ways that the boys get a whole lot of 
 arithmetic and what we used to call natural philosophy, 
 too. Ever3i:hing is educational first and useful after- 
 ward — ^though Tom says there is no valid distinction 
 between the useful and the educational. 
 
 A thing happened just yesterday which shows how 
 things are going here. My little granddaughter 
 brought me her "Field and Garden Book," and in- 
 sisted on my looking at it. It is a pretty little book, 
 covered in red, and bound with a silk cord. On the 
 first page is a notice "To the Club Members" which 
 reads thus: "This book when complete will be the 
 record of your garden club work. Write in it only 
 with ink, and keep it clean and correct. You will be 
 asked to show it every time you are visited. Next fall 
 when you have completed your garden club work, and 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 137 
 
 this record, you will be asked to turn it in as proof of 
 your work. No credit will be granted unless the record 
 is complete. — Tom Whelpley, Principal." On the next 
 page was a charming photograph of little Marian, my 
 grandchild, standing in her garden. On the next was a 
 series of ten items to be filled out "as you get the infor- 
 mation required." From this I was delighted to learn 
 that (1) her name is Marian Dunham, (2) she belongs 
 to the Fairview Consolidated School, (3) it was the 
 season of 1915, (4) the size of the plot was 16 square 
 yards, or 2 rods by 8 rods ; (5) the crops were radishes, 
 sweet corn, peas, lettuce, and celery — ^by which I knew 
 she had rented the ground of Frank Wiggins so as to 
 be near Dais/s baby; (6) her total income was $15.34 
 — ^which I didn't believe until I looked over her ac- 
 counts; (7) the total cost of rent, fertilizer, seed, hired 
 labor, and so forth was $2.25 ; leaving her a total profit 
 of (8) $13.09; signed and certified to by (9) Maude 
 Ackerman, Teacher. (Maude is one of the Ackerman 
 girls who thought they had to teach in the city in order 
 to be doing really respectable school work, but was 
 tempted out into the new schoolhouse by Tom Whelp- 
 le)r's Teimessee drawl. This accounts for John Acker- 
 man's buying those lots of me. He's going to build 
 there next spring and move back.) 
 
 Item (10) in Marian's book is imder the head of 
 "Disposal of Net Proceeds." Under this I was in- 
 formed that she had paid out $3.09 for various frivoli- 
 ties, a large part of which was for materials for a hat. 
 The hat itself was designed and made in school in Miss 
 
138 JRE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 Falk's domestic economy class; and Marian received 
 credits on her school work for making the hat. Fol- 
 lowing this are two pages for "itemized expenses and 
 itemized receipts," and then a note, which is a sort of 
 preface to "The Story of My Garden Plot." This note 
 enjoins upon Marian the propriety of writing the story 
 in diary form, giving first the date and then the event. 
 This utilizes the deep and abiding instinctive passion 
 of girls to keep diaries. The instruction is given to 
 use ink and keep the story neat. "This story must in- 
 clude how and from whom you obtained your land, 
 date of measuring the plot, dimensions, and who 
 helped you to measure it; fertilization, plowing and 
 harrowing, planting, progress of crops and incidentals ; 
 to whom, when and in what amounts the crop was dis- 
 posed of, and the sums received for it; and again 
 'Disposal of Proceeds.' " Marian was also required to 
 keep a record of visits, on pages provided for that pur- 
 pose, with the visitor's signatures ; and this interesting 
 little volume closed with a certificate as to the correct- 
 ness of the record, signed by Marian's mother as par- 
 ent, and by Frank Wiggins as "Country Life Director." 
 There is also a "recommendation of achievement" au- 
 thorizing the powers that be to grant Marian a certain 
 number of units of achievement on the merits of the 
 report. 
 
 Now, this may not be very thrilling to you, but to 
 Marian it was. Bear in mind that Marian is only one 
 of a large number of girls and boys organized in this 
 "Field and Garden Club," under the supervision of 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 139 
 
 teachers and helpers as Country Life Directors. Re- 
 member, too, that other children were in poultry clubs, 
 others in com clubs, others in pig clubs, others in 
 canning clubs, and that we have connected with the 
 school one society composed of just folks, regardless of 
 age, called the Fairview Society for the Study of In- 
 sect Life, which specialized last year in chinch-bugs, 
 white grubs, and the Hessian fly ; and a similar society 
 for the study of economic botany, which has taken up 
 pedigreed seeds. 
 
 Each member of these school clubs has a sign-board, 
 made by the boys of the school, according to a standard 
 design produced by Adolph Tulp. Credits were given 
 in the manual training course for making the signs. 
 Marian's sign reads, "Member Fairview School and 
 Garden Club," and is carefully placed so as to be visi- 
 ble from the road. 
 
 Now, when I went to school it took a boy like Wil- , 
 fred Raymond to be really crazy about school work. 
 The rest of us hated it. We really had to be clubbed 
 into going, and coerced into staying. Any self-respect- 
 ing boy admired the fellow who had the nerve to play 
 hooky and take a licking for it; but in Tom Whelp- 
 ley's school the reading, writing, arithmetic, history 
 and all the rest of it is just a by-product of projects 
 in which the children are so interested that they dream 
 of them nights. The garden club work and the other 
 things I have mentioned are only a small part of it. 
 There is a whole list of school-home projects. They 
 have achievement emblems which take the place of the 
 
140 JHE.FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 Greek letter buttons worn in colleges. THey have 
 credit-awarding exercises held in the auditorium. And 
 once in a while we have a moving-picture show, or a 
 concert ; and ti^rice in a while we have feasts cooked by 
 the domestic economy classes (credits given, of 
 course) and served by another squad, also receiving 
 credits. The children are given school credits for 
 washing dishes, taking care of the baby, making beds, 
 feeding live stock, working in the garden, and other 
 things which they do for their parents. 
 
 Hans Larsen objected to his children's going into 
 club work, because, he said, he needed their work him- 
 self. Now he says they have not only carried on their 
 own work and made enough money so that they put on 
 the air of business men and are learning what money in 
 the bank means, but they have done more helpful work 
 for their parents and done it more cheerfully than ever 
 before. Hans has coined an aphorism which I think 
 is worth preserving. It is : "Cheerfulness bane better 
 for work dan stoutness." 
 
 We have a lot of what Tom calls "school-home proj- 
 ects." One of these relates to business ; and a young 
 person must make a net profit of at least fifty dollars 'a 
 year to get credit in this. There are Cooking and Sew- 
 ing School-Home Projects, Poultry School-Home 
 Projects, Music School-Home Projects, and I don't 
 know but more by this time; for when a craze like this 
 strikes a neighborhood, they almost always overdo it. 
 
 After looking this over my wife insists that it gives 
 a wholly wrong impression of the change in our neigh- 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 141 
 
 borhood life brought about by the ruralized rural 
 school and the truly rural country church. 
 
 "It sounds sordid," says she. "It sounds as if all we 
 were working for is the almighty dollar. It doesn't 
 say a word about the newer and sweeter spirit in the 
 air, and the new sense of neighborship, and the ties 
 which have been woven between the older settlers' fam- 
 ines and the new people, and especially the tenant 
 farmers. It doesn't say anything about the better 
 leases the landlords are giving their tenants, and the 
 better practises which the tenants have begun to adopt 
 on their side. And it never hints at our growing cul- 
 ture." 
 
 Well, I can't tell everything at once, can I? And 
 then there are those bulletins which you haven't read 
 yet, if you are interested. Moreover, I believe the first 
 duty of man is to make a living; and the practical 
 things of life are what appeal to me most. It's differ- 
 ent with the women. As a matter of fact, though, I 
 suppose Adolph Tulp is the most typical transcenden- 
 talist in our commtinity, and he was certainly not an 
 ornament to society when Tom, and Frank Wiggins, 
 took him up and made him a member of the faculty of 
 the school. Adolph made a speech the other evening 
 when we staged a little play written by Wilson Beefie's 
 second boy, called An American Peasant, and portray- 
 ing the evils of farm tenantry in the Fairview neigh- 
 borhood. 
 
 "When I came to America," said Adolph, "I thought 
 that the polling place, and the election was where the 
 
142 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 soul of America would be found. And soon I made 
 up my mind that America had no soul, and that democ- 
 racy and liberty and equality were just words. But 
 here in these social center activities of the Fairview 
 School, I have found the soul of American democracy. 
 This will be to America what the Greek Church is to 
 Russia, what the Empire should be to Germany, but 
 isn't, what the race is to Japan, what the family is to 
 China, what the old gods are to the Hindu. We are 
 here building the temple in which America shall house 
 the Ark of her Covenant — ^the whole people going to 
 school to each other !" 
 
 This seems a good deal like sentimentalism to me. 
 There's enough in the study of good farming and all 
 it implies to make up an education good enough for 
 anybody's children. In fact, four boys and two girls 
 are driving out from town every day this very year to 
 attend the Fairview School, because the folks in the 
 city are finding out that we give a better schooling for 
 any kid anywhere than they can give in town — ^and they 
 pay tuition to the district for the privilege. After all, 
 money is what talks. 
 
 There are a few things which tell of what our school 
 gives in the way of intellectual inspiration which may 
 be convincing to those who can not see that what we 
 have acquired is more abundant life, and when you get 
 life, it will grow in every direction and express itself in 
 every way in spite of you. Take that play written by 
 young Morton Beebe. We liked it, because it deals 
 with our own life. Of course we never had the nerve 
 
FAIRVIEW'S NEW HIRED MAN 143 
 
 to think that there was anything in it worth the atten- 
 tion of college people ; but Tom Whelpley has had in- 
 vitations to speak on the Western Movement in Rural 
 Drama before college societies in Pittsburgh, Chicago 
 and New York. Other schools which happen to be 
 filled with their own proper life are doing similar 
 things — a lot of farmers in North Dakota and Min- 
 nesota are crazy about farm plays. One fellow in 
 New York wrote Tom that he greeted these as possible 
 beginnings of a real drama — "as significant," said he, 
 "as Ralph Roister Doister, or Gammer Gurton's 
 Needle" — ^whatever they may be. 
 
 And then there is the case of Sylvia Wheeler, of 
 Wheeler's Crossroads. She'll write a versified sort 
 of ritual for one of our little pageants, or processions, 
 like the ones we have at a colt fair or flower jamboree, 
 on three days' notice at any time. But the most ex- 
 treme case is that of Eddie Blair, a fifteen-year-old boy 
 who never was worth much until Tom came among 
 us. I went to visit the school one day to give the 
 animal husbandry class a talk on Maintenance Rations 
 for Brood Sows — ^half the teaching in that blamed 
 school is done by the men and women of the district — 
 and I saw on Eddie's desk a lot of fimny-looking dia- 
 grams with angles and curves, more of which he was 
 drawing. "What's this?" said I. He blushed and 
 squirmed as a kid will ; but Tom explained that Eddie 
 was calculating some astronomical phenomenon. "I 
 can't explain it fully," said Tom, "because it runs too 
 deep into mathematics for me. That boy will one of 
 
144 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 these days be a great mathematician, or scientist, or 
 engineer." 
 
 Now I've looked back over the history of the district 
 for forty years, and under our old system of "culture," 
 when we were raising our boys to be dentists and doc- 
 tors and lawyers and presidents of the United States, 
 and our girls to be the wives of professional men and 
 merchants, I could think of only one pupil who had 
 shown as much ability in things generally thought to 
 be "cultural" as half a dozen we have now. That one 
 was Doctor Ra3miond, Daisy Wiggins' father. And he 
 wasn't half as smart as Eddie Blair or Sylvia Wheeler, 
 or Morton Beebe. 
 
 "Undoubtedly," says the Reverend Frank Wiggins, 
 "the new zest of life which our vocational teaching is 
 giving our people is making them better acquainted with 
 Shakespeare and Emerson than they would have been 
 if we had put courses in Emerson and Shakespeare in 
 the course of study. Probably we shall develop poets, 
 painters, dramatists, scientists, engineers, chemists and 
 novelists from our school in time, which the world 
 would never have known if we hadn't begun to cor- 
 relate our school and neighborhood life with the voca- 
 tion we all have to follow." 
 
 "Sculptors, too," said Adolph Tulp, who has one or 
 two engaged in modeling in clay, and making iron 
 flowers. 
 
 Personally, though, I'm satisfied if we can do better 
 farming, and not be grouchy about it all the time. 
 That's what I see in the thing — the abolition of the 
 
FAIRVIEWS NEW HIRED MAN 145 
 
 Rural Grouch. It's about cured me, I confess, and 
 I had it in a malignant form only as far back as when 
 they tried to induct Tom Whelpley as county agent. 
 We're all glad now that they failed. He is worth 
 more where he is. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 AN ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 
 
 WE people of the Fairview District are sometimes 
 accused of conceit on account of the so-called 
 socialization of our neighborhood. I claim that there 
 is no such thing as a taint of Socialism in it. My con- 
 tention is that we have carried right through to its 
 logical conclusion, on a few lines, the sort of thing 
 which my New England ancestors laid the foundation 
 for in the free school and the town meeting. 
 
 If John Endicott, for instance, were running a Corn- 
 Belt community in 1916, he would insist on a consoli- 
 dated rural school with an assembly hall for free dis- 
 cussion of everything under the sun, moving pictures, 
 lectures, eating and drinking, and music. And if old 
 John knew the importance to a farming people of a 
 knowledge of soils, crops, insects, bacteria, fungi, 
 sprays, rotations, and community breeding, buying and 
 marketing, he would be for all our "new things," in- 
 cluding the county agent, the county short course, the 
 ruralized rural school, the boys' and girls' clubs and all 
 the rest of it, including, I believe, our local plays and 
 pageants, and the baseball, track meets, and dancing. 
 Maybe not the dancing — ^but I believe he'd be for that. 
 I'm sure he'd be for the Fairview Meeting House, and 
 
 146 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 147 
 
 the Reverend Frank Wiggins and Daisy, his wife. If 
 he weren't, fo« most of this program he'd be in a 
 mighty insignificant minority. For those are the 
 things of which we are accused, with some small rea- 
 son, maybe, of being conceitedly proud. 
 
 We pride ourselves on having the answer to almost 
 any rural-hfe problem. By two problems, however, 
 we are frankly stumped. One of these is the increas- 
 ing price of land which is making it harder and harder 
 all the time for any one to start in farming. The 
 other is the back-to-the-lander. We know the back-to- 
 the-lander of old. We had him in the early days of the 
 country's settlement — especially in the seventies, when 
 lots of people came from the cities to the prairies, 
 green as grass and chodc-full of misinformation, with 
 the idea that any one knew enough to farm; but the 
 most hopeless part of the back-to-the-lander is the 
 kind we have now. 
 
 The piffle in the magazines and newspapers about 
 miracles of success in farming, and fairy stories of 
 agriculture send men from the cities to the land in a 
 frame of mind far more unfavorable to success than 
 we found in the hazy ignorance or bumptious optimism 
 of those sent out by Horace Greele3r's "Go west, yotmg 
 man." They now come with false science. They are 
 the boys who have read that when the sides of Mother 
 Earth are tickled with a hoe she breaks out into a reg- 
 ular ha-ha of harvest, the chaps who when you tell 
 them that farming is done on a mighty close margin, 
 speak patronizingly of intensive cultivation and of 
 
148 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 making two blades of grass grow where none ever 
 grew before, of the application of factory system to 
 farming, and of the new science of Efficiency as applied 
 to Agriculture. These are hopeless, to my mind, and 
 we give them up. If they have money we sell them 
 land, and wait patiently to see them fail — "like vul- 
 tures," as one of them said, "watching for the lost 
 traveler to fall that they may devour him." But sup- 
 pose the traveler insists on being devoured, and won't 
 take "no" for an answer? How about that? 
 
 It seems to me that whenever one of these agricul- 
 tural revolutionists takes it into his head along with 
 other truck in it, to go out and show us rubes how to 
 farm, he strikes a bee-line for our neck of the woods 
 to get advice; for the farm papers which most of them 
 read for a year or so before they start have instilled 
 into their brains the feeling that they ought to take ad- 
 vice before actually beginning the careers by which 
 they will prove that because Texas is as large as the 
 German Empire, which supports seventy millions of 
 people, the United States could easily maintain three 
 times the whole population of the ^obe. So he thinks 
 he will take fifteen or twenty minutes oflf to advise 
 with a few men like me, and find out all we know. 
 The man they visit first is usually Tom Whelpley, 
 Principal of the Fairview Consolidated Rural School, 
 and Neighborhood Man-of-all-Work. He is the best 
 advertised man we have. The papers write him up 
 often. And it admonishes me of the flight of time 
 while we have been building up our community or- 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 149 
 
 ganization to remember how long ago it was when 
 Tom came to me with Wilberforce Fogg and an ex- 
 pression of anxiety. 
 
 "Mr. Dunham," said he, "this is Mr. Fogg, of Chi- 
 cago, of whom I spoke to you." 
 
 "I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Fogg," said I. "You're 
 the gentleman, I believe, who thinks he can get rich 
 on eggs by keepmg one hen per square foot, aren't 
 you?" 
 
 "No," he said, "I haven't studied poultry." 
 
 "Then," I went on, "maybe you're the person who 
 sees a forttme in sprouting rhubarb in the cellar for 
 winter consumption, or in horseradish, or ginseng, or 
 Belgian hares, or portulaca seed. Something like that, 
 I'm sure." 
 
 "No," said he, and he blushed a little as he said it, 
 " — er, that is, I have thought a combination of mush- 
 rooms and rhubarb might add to profits; but my ambi- 
 tion is to develop a few acres of land to the point of 
 making me a good income in dairying. I say a few 
 acres, because by taking less land one saves on invest- 
 ment, and by intensive cultivation one may make every 
 square jrard of land work harder and produce more. 
 The state of Texas — " 
 
 "Yes," said I, "I know about the state of Texas. It 
 is as large as the German Empire — and the rest of it." 
 
 "Don't you believe in intensive cultivation?" asked 
 he, much in the same tone as that used by teachers 
 when they ask if two and two don't make four. 
 
 "I don't know anything about it," said I; "extensive 
 
ISO THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 cultivation is hard enough for me ; since I can begin to 
 remember, though, everything's been tried about here 
 once or twice. I don't know of any farming which is 
 succeeding worth a darn that is more intensive than 
 mine." 
 
 "Well," said he, "Professor King shows that the 
 Chinese system of intensive agriculture supports a pop- 
 ulation in some places of over three thousand to the 
 square mile, or nearly five persons to the acre." 
 
 "Does King say that?" I asked of Tom. 
 
 "Yes," replied Tom, "I believe he does, but see how 
 they live. And the real test is not how many live to 
 the square mile, but how they live." 
 
 "And how many die to the square mile?" I sug- 
 gested. 
 
 "That's so," asserted Fogg. 
 
 "And it's generally overlooked," said Tom. "The 
 population of China is stationary, though the birth-rate 
 is very high. What keeps it stationary? Starvation! 
 Down in the Alabama woods along the sandy barrens 
 of the Gulf shore, where I once worked in a turpentine 
 camp, there is a sparse population of razor-back hogs. 
 They don't seem to increase in numbers though they 
 are very prolific — in that way resembling the Chinese. 
 I found that a mother pig with a litter of ten would 
 lose them at the rate of about one a day until the num- 
 ber came down to what she could nourish — about two 
 pigs. Most Chinese babies die. They have to. Too 
 many people being forced to live on the rich lands of 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 151 
 
 China produce the same result as too few acorns on 
 the sandy barrens of Alabama." 
 
 "Gosh !" said I — I was thinking of the poor babies. 
 "Before we reach that point, I hope the sea over- 
 whehns us." 
 
 "But," said Wilberforce Fogg, quite unconvinced, 
 "surely such men as Prince Kropotkin know what they 
 are talking about when they speak of the almost un- 
 limited capacity of the earth to produce food and shel- 
 ter and clothing. And Kropotkin says — " 
 
 "How much farming has he ever done in the Com 
 Belt ?" I asked. "In the Com Belt, farming is a ques- 
 tion of labor. We sell on a market created by ma- 
 chine-made crops. Intensive farming means hand- 
 made crops. Where food is scarce and flesh and blood 
 are cheap, the hand process of making crops is cheaper 
 than machine processes, I suppose. It pays better in 
 Hong-Kong, I am told, to drive spiles by hand than to 
 use a steam spile-driver. But if you try raising com 
 by the Chinese method in the Mississippi Valley, you'll 
 go broke, thank God, just as surely as you would if 
 you tried driving spiles according to their ways. That's 
 all there is to this business of intensive farming — and 
 there ain't any use of talking with me any further 
 about it." 
 
 "I am determined," said Wilberforce Fogg, "to get 
 out of the soot and grime and slavery of the city. I 
 am determined to go back to the land. Nobody can 
 dissuade me !" 
 
152 .THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 He said this with his voice rising to a sort of wail, 
 slightly broken at the close, as if with emotion; and 
 as I looked into his eyes when he ceased speaking, they 
 seemed to me to be moist with tears. 
 
 "Well," said I, "who in thunder is trying to dis- 
 suade you? Go your length — and if there's anjrthing 
 I can do to grease the ways, command me." 
 
 "I don't want you to think, Mr. Fogg," broke in Tom 
 Whelpley, "that I fully agree with Uncle Abner on the 
 subject of intensive farming. A great many absurdi- 
 ties have been said and written about it ; but we don't 
 yet know the degree of intensification which will bring 
 us to the loss line. That's one of the things we hope 
 to work out in the Fairview Rural School within ten 
 years. All we know now is that under our conditions, 
 the larger farms pay best as farming is done; but once 
 in a while a small farm is found, that pays well. Take 
 such cases as Arnold Martin, of Nebraska, and many 
 others. What we need is a close and coordinated study 
 of every small farm in the United States which pays 
 well, so as to learn why they do so. The time is com- 
 ing when the large farms will have to be divided, or 
 our farming people separated into a permanent class of 
 landed aristocrats, and another permanent class of 
 landless peasants." 
 
 "Arid the way it looks to me now," I put in, "the de- 
 velopment will be in the direction of landowners and 
 casual laborers — ^tramps. That don't look very good 
 for the country!" 
 
 "Well," said Wilberforce, "I shall never be able to 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 153 
 
 buy a big farm. I'm not a big man. I'm small fry in 
 the city, and I'll be small fry in the country, I suppose, 
 but I'm going back to the land !" 
 
 "How much money have you?" asked Tom. 
 
 "About eight hundred dollars," replied Fogg. 
 
 "Lucky it isn't more!" said I. "If you had eight 
 thousand you'd lose it, and your credit would be better. 
 So you'd go broke owing more. What family have 
 you?" 
 
 "I'm single," said he, "and have no one dependent 
 upon me ; but — " 
 
 He stopped and blushed. In fact, one thing I liked 
 about the chap was his blushing. I've seen fools that 
 blushed easily, but never a bad m^n. This fellow 
 Fogg seemed to be a good sort of lunatic, after all. 
 
 "Well," said I, "spit it out. You've got a girl. 
 That's a very important factor in a farmer's life. Tell 
 me about her. If she isn't the right sort, you may as 
 well give up this back-to-the-Ianding first as last." 
 
 "WeU," said he, as a matter of course, "she's the 
 most splendid girl in the world. I'm foreman in a box 
 factory, getting a himdred dollars a month. She's 
 cashier in a laundry at ten a week. She has a hundred 
 dollars or so saved up, but ten a week don't go far in 
 Chicago. I wish you could see her, Mr. Dunham !" 
 
 "Does she know anything about farm life?" asked 
 Tom Whelpley. 
 
 "Not a thing," answered Fogg, "but she's stuck on 
 it. She reads a great deal, and she likes horses and 
 cows and birds and flowers and green fields and new 
 
154 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 mown hay. And she's a good housekeeper. You 
 ought to taste the fudge she makes !" 
 
 Now it was perfectly clear that these were two ma- 
 ture young fools — for neither of them was very young 
 — ^who were carried away by the deluge of piffle about 
 Backtothelandia which floods the press. While Fogg 
 was out in the field seeing how a haystacker works, 
 Tom and I discussed him, and I expressed the above 
 opinion. 
 
 "He'll fail as sure as eggs is eggs," I insisted. 
 
 "I think so, too," said Tom ; "but how can we keep 
 him from making the fatal mistake? I think he'll take 
 my advice. I brought him over here to let you size 
 him up so as to get your help. If he only knew a lit- 
 tle something about farming, so he could understand 
 our reasoning, it would be easier. If he had only 
 worked as a farm hand for a few years, we could — " 
 
 "Why, if he had done that," said I, "he'd make good 
 as a farmer ; and all that stuff he has read might some 
 of it do him some good. Why not advise him ri^t — 
 tell him to start in as a farm hand until he learns the — 
 the—" 
 
 "Technique?" suggested Tom. 
 
 "I think that must be it," I said. "I want him to 
 know how much backache there is in a farmer's dollar, 
 and how many chances in his year; how to pitch ma- 
 nure without getting sick of his job, and how to con- 
 duct a lying-in hospital for hogs without having his 
 stomach turned. Anyhow, he can do that without 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 155 
 
 losing anything more than his job. He can save that 
 little wad of money. Bring him in, and I'll advise him ! 
 And if I'm in wrong, you can reverse me." 
 
 Wilberforce Fogg stood before us after he came in 
 from the hayfield a good deal in the attitude of a hired 
 man charged with designs on the melon-patch. 
 
 "Maybe you'd better tell Mr. Dunham," said Tom 
 Whelpley, "something about your plans for getting 
 back to the land. Just how do you plan to go about it ?" 
 
 "Well," said he, "I — ^that is, we planned to look 
 around and find a little farm which we could buy on 
 time, making our first payment with my eight hundred 
 dollars. My mother has a little money, but I won't 
 take any of that. It's too small a fortune anyhow to 
 support her, and she is living on the principal. I hope 
 to God she'll live long enough to live it all up ; and that 
 I can have the privilege of supporting her for a long 
 time after it's all gone — so you see I haven't any ex- 
 pectations. I must paddle my own canoe. I shall have 
 to start on the eight hundred ; and we haven't a doubt 
 we can make a go of it. I didn't tell you, did I, that 
 the doctors tell me that I must get into the open?" 
 
 "No," said Tom. "Why didn't you say that in the 
 first place?" 
 
 "Because," replied he, "that isn't the real reason. 
 We want to get out into the country — Millie and I." 
 
 "Well now, son," said I, "let me tell you that the 
 plan you've laid is all wrong. You want to learn farm- 
 ing. Learn it at some one else's expense. You want to 
 
156 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 make a living. Make it by your work at the rudiments 
 of farming with some one else to furnish the capital, 
 and do the planning. How much would you be satis- 
 fied to make clear on your first year's work on this 
 little farm you're planning to buy?" 
 
 "Well," said he, "of course, I — we should make 
 mistakes. I have felt that if we could barely live the 
 first year we should be doing pretty well — don't you 
 think so?" 
 
 "Would you be satisfied if you cleared three hundred 
 dollars above your board ?" 
 
 "I certainly should," cried Wilberforce. "Show me 
 how, and lead me to it !" 
 
 "Hire out as a farm hand at twenty-five dollars a 
 month. If you want to be a dairyman, hire out on a 
 dairy farm. Leave the eight hundred dollars in the 
 bank, and put twenty-five more with it every month. 
 Learn the habits, tricks, and the language of cows. 
 Learn to milk, keep a score sheet, and do individual 
 feeding with a balanced ration. Study the dairy prop- 
 osition from every angle. Take a year, two years, 
 years enough to absorb all the thousand and one little 
 bits of knowledge that never get into the books or 
 papers. Learn on other people's cows, other people's 
 feeds, other people's capital. Make the dairy business 
 pay you for learning it. Play safe, young man, play 
 safe. The only way to do this is to go to work at the 
 farming business at the bottom as a hired man. Every 
 back-to-the-lander ought to be obliged by law to do it 
 It would make intelligent and interested hired men 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 157 
 
 more plentiful for us farmers, and it would save a 
 lot of fools from making themselves ridiculous and 
 going broke." 
 
 I wonder just how many people there are in the 
 cities and towns who are bitten by the bug of Back- 
 tothelandia. Thousands and thousands, of course, 
 and probably millions. Otherwise the daily papers and 
 city people's magazines would not print so much about 
 getting back to the land. Otherwise every actor and 
 actress wouldn't say to the papers that his or her chief 
 ambition is to retire to a little farm or ranch. Other- 
 wise every wrestler, pugilist, and baseball player 
 wouldn't buy a farm with the first big purse won or 
 saved. After all, we are still an agricultural people. 
 To be sure, only about a third of us live in the coun- 
 try, but of the other two-thirds a goodly number have 
 moved in from the farms, were farmers in Europe, or 
 are descended from the old American stock which was 
 as purely agricultural as the Russian people only a gen- 
 eration or so ago. Figuratively, we are a nation of 
 rustics treading the pavements with the plowman's 
 shamble and dried mud on our brogans. Why, down 
 at the stone-crusher along the track back of Abel 
 Bohn's there is always a gang of fifty to a hundred 
 Italians at work, and every one of them, so far as I 
 can discover, lived on a farm in Italy. The same thing 
 is true of the Hunkies in the section crews. 
 
 Now in a people so derived, there must be a powerful 
 instinct impelling people back to the farms. It is a ra- 
 cial reversion to type. "You may sigh, you may cry. 
 
158 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 you may moan, you may groan; but you can't do a 
 thing with what's bred in the bone." Wilberforce Fogg 
 is a type of the sort of tadpole with which our cities 
 are filled, who naturally tend to shed their city tails 
 and get out on land as rural frogs. His case, therefore, 
 is very important. It is a great national problem. 
 
 Tom Whelpley and I were not conscious that when 
 he took hold of Wilberforce's situation as a question 
 of sociological engineering we were grappling with the 
 Great American Riddle, which is guessing the true 
 route to Backtothelandia. This is the sociological 
 Northwest Passage, the voyage which leads through 
 latitudes which cause ice to form on the outsides of 
 most of the back-to-the-landers' boots, the Baffin's 
 Bays and Davis Straits of the ocean of American in- 
 dustrial discontent. 
 
 I personally don't believe in this doctrine of back-to- 
 the-land, for in my opinion there are enough people on 
 the land now. I think the city people should stay in 
 the cities, and the country people on the farms, where 
 they both know what to do ; but I found out long ago 
 that the nation is not going to consult me. Therefore, 
 I contend, if we are always, or for a considerable 
 length of time, going to have this shifting of people 
 from the cities to the country, if the tendency back to 
 the land is to be a constant movement, there should be 
 a Panama Canal dug to take the place of the icebergs 
 and snows of the present passage. In other words, 
 there should be some organized system of getting peo- 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 159 
 
 pie back to the land if they want to get back, without 
 wrecking nine out of ten of their cockle-shell boats. 
 
 And between ourselves, the country people fleeing 
 from rural delights to the towns need easing into their 
 new berths quite as much as do the city tenderfeet who 
 come to us with their hifalutin talk about humus and 
 legumes and protein and carbohydrates — ^the patter 
 they have picked up on the printed page. 
 
 "I can't do that!" cried Wilberforce Fogg when I 
 showed him the first step from the box factory to the 
 farm, "I can't do that ! Don't you see? I want a home 
 in the country !" 
 
 "All right," said I ; "success to you in getting it — 
 and especially in keeping it. Mr. Whelpley may be 
 able to give you better advice than mine. I don't think 
 so, though. Good luck to you." 
 
 About a month after this conversation I was ac- 
 costed on the street in town by a wiry-looking little 
 chap who asked me to step into the bank with him. 
 
 "I'm not known here, Mr. Dimham," said he, "and 
 I would like to have you identify me. I have a little 
 check to cash." 
 
 I didn't recognize him, and my look told him so. 
 
 "Don't you remember me?" asked he. "Here I am 
 on this check;" and I read it, "Wilberforce Fogg." 
 The check was signed by Harry Wade, a new fellow 
 who has located about four miles off to the east of us, 
 and is said to be running an up-to-date dairy farm. 
 The check was for twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents, 
 
160 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 and at its lower right-hand corner was written "In full 
 for wages to date." 
 
 "M'h'm," I mumbled, as I do sometimes when a 
 thing dawns on me — "so you decided to take the 
 plunge, eh?" 
 
 "Yes," said he, "and Mr. Whelpley convinced me 
 that I ought to make it the way you advised me. Mr. 
 Wade says that in another month I'll be a pretty fair 
 hand. I've got over being disgusted with it, now ; and 
 sleep ! And eat ! Well, I must buy a few things for Mrs. 
 Wade and hurry home. I have about twenty calves 
 to feed." 
 
 When I got home that night my wife was swinging 
 in a hammock-couch on the porch, though it was the 
 time when she should have been at her very busiest 
 getting supper. Something unusual was up, and I put 
 my car in the garage and went to the house to find 
 out what it was. 
 
 "Well," said Mrs. Dunham, "I've hired another girl 
 — and she is getting supper." 
 
 "Good !" said I. "Where did you pick up a girl ? 
 Who is she?" 
 
 "Her name is Millie," said my wife, "and Daisy 
 Wiggins picked her up for me. She's from Chicago ; 
 and she never worked out before; and whether or not 
 she's any good is to be told when supper is ready, say 
 in about ten minutes from now. But she's got to be 
 pretty poor if she doesn't stay as long as she wants to 
 stay* I've struck for higher wages and shorter hours." 
 
 Now there happened to be no girl named Millie in 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 161 
 
 all my list of acquaintances; but the name seemed 
 strangely familiar. She was a mighty pretty girl, but 
 her general get-up was a little extreme for the kitchen. 
 If her hair had been a little yellower, and had con- 
 tained a quart or so more of puffs and rats, she'd have 
 passed for the twin of the girl that sells tickets in front 
 of the new moving-picture theater in the county seat — 
 that blonde cashier type, you understand. There was 
 more or less paint on her face, too, as was quite ap- 
 parent when the heat of cooking brought the blood 
 surging into the thin skin under it. Altogether, she 
 didn't look promising — ^and her supper was nothing to 
 brag of. From the first it was plain, too, that she was 
 homesick. The paint and powder were washed off in 
 tears as well as sweat, I feel sure, and when the week 
 wore along until Saturday, and she hadn't demanded 
 that she be taken to town, the thing became a marvel 
 to me. I thought I knew hired girls, you know. 
 
 On Sunday morning, I was surprised to see Wilber- 
 force Fogg drive into the yard with one of Harry 
 Wade's buckskin bronchos, and still more astonished 
 when Millie, all rigged out in her best ran out, climbed 
 in and went off with him for a drive. I saw it all, now. 
 Millie was the girl of whom Fogg had spoken. She 
 was the other side of the Backtothelandia sketch. 
 
 "I think," said I to Mother, "that you now have a 
 hired girl who will stay with you for a while." 
 
 I couldn't help feeling an increased respect for the 
 girl, and a growing appreciation of her woman's com- 
 mon sense, as well as her woman's devotion. If Wil- 
 
162 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 berforce needed to know country life by actual contact 
 with its roughest and humblest facts, certainly Millie 
 needed to learn the same things. They were engaged 
 in the most important task to which two young people 
 can address themselves, the founding of a home; and 
 first, they were conquering the treetop in which to 
 build their nest — caged birds as they had always been. 
 As we grew better acquainted with them they used 
 to spend their Sundays with us at the farm instead of 
 driving about the countryside. They were always 
 talking over the business of farming. Millie herself 
 grew rapidly in skill as farm cook and housewife, but 
 the interest she took in the crops, the poultry, the gar- 
 den, the butter and eggs, the milk, the care and nurture 
 of the young pigs and calves has set her apart from all 
 the women we have ever had helping us on the farm. 
 She was determined to learn ever)rthing a farm woman 
 ought to know. She wrestled with her dislike of the 
 drudgery; '-and she finally conquered it. She never 
 got over looking and acting a little light-minded and 
 frivolous; and Wilberforce never outgrew being an 
 opinionated and contentious little nonentity; and that 
 is the real significance of the experience of these two — 
 they were just ordinary people, with no special ability, 
 no special excellence of character; little money, and no 
 experience. They were only two people very much 
 devoted to each other, one of whom was determined to 
 become a farmer, and both of whom were attacking the 
 farming problem in the right way — going at it sys- 
 tematically, and playing safe. 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 163 
 
 "I believe theirs is the only way for the city man 
 to get back to the land," said I to Tom Whelpley one 
 day, as we discussed the progress made by Millie and 
 Bill, as she had taught us to call Wilberforce. "Harry 
 Wade is going back to Illinois to settle up his father's 
 estate, and Fogg is to take charge while he is gone. 
 Wouldn't that surprise you? He has become a pretty 
 good dairjmian in a little more than a year. As for 
 Millie, we shan't know how to get along without her 
 when Bill takes her away from us. She can cook now, 
 and as for chickens — ^why that girl made me get her 
 an incubator, just so she coiJd learn to run it on our 
 eggs instead of the Fogg family's investment, and the 
 place is lousy with chickeps. It's the only way, Tom, 
 to Backtothelandia." 
 
 "It's the best way," said Tom, "but not the only one. 
 I've another family of back-to-the-landers beating 
 along the coast of the promised land, by a different 
 method. And they, too, are making a success of it." 
 
 "Who is it?" I asked. 
 
 "The Favilles," said Tom. 
 
 "Not J. J. Faville, and his lawyer wife ! Not they!" 
 
 "No," said Tom, "it's Doctor Faville's folks— J. J.'s 
 brother. You know Doc Faville. Get into the car, 
 and we'll run into town and see how they are doing it." 
 
 Now the Favilles represent another phase of back-to- 
 the-landing. They were middle-aged people, with a 
 son and daughter pretty nearly grown. Doctor Faville 
 had never had much of a practise; and in the growth 
 of the town, and the influx of new physicians with their 
 
164 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 vaccines, serums, microscopes, good clothes, hospital 
 connections and all the new developments the doctor 
 had been lost sight of. He wasn't of the sort that 
 makes a fight for place and position. He always 
 looked sort of seedy. The others were spruce and sani- 
 tary-looking. His office was shabby-looking, and 
 while they took rooms in th^ new office buildings which 
 delivered people by means of elevators, one had to 
 climb to Doctor Faville's old rooms by a stairway. 
 Mrs. Faville had inherited a farm from her father; 
 but neither she nor her husband had ever lived in 
 the country, or knew a thing about farming. Never- 
 theless, they had come to Tom Whelpley with the 
 question, "Why not move to the farm and make their 
 living off it?" Tom had undertaken the job of edu- 
 cating them for country life. 
 
 "And," said Tom, "I'll show you how a family may 
 get half-way back to the land while living in town. 
 I'm taking the Faville family back by easy stages. I 
 think you'll be interested." 
 
 I was — and any one would be who sees the pity of 
 unpreparedness to the back-to-the-lander. Tom told 
 the Favilles that the A B C of farming and several 
 of the subsequent letters of the alphabet can be learned 
 on a small scale as well as a large one ; so he had ad- 
 vised the Favilles to engage in the cultivation of vacant 
 lots. They found the lots just across the street from 
 their house in town; and under Tom's tutelage had 
 entered upon the systematic cultivation of them with 
 their own hands. They laid off the miniature farm in 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 165 
 
 plats of a tenth of an acre each, like the test plats at 
 an experiment station. On these they had all sorts of 
 garden crops, and also little squares of wheat, com, 
 oats, alfalfa, and all the crops of our part of the 
 country. They harvested their wheat at the proper 
 time, threshed it, measured and weighed it, kept ac- 
 coimt of the labor expended upon it, studied its smuts, 
 blight, Hessian fly, and the rest of them, as religiously 
 as if their livings had depended on the crop. More 
 so, I believe, for they had more time for it. They had 
 a good-sized com patch from which they were picking 
 green com for the table, and lots of peas, beans, beets, 
 turnips, onions, lettuce and other vegetables, from 
 which they were religiously selling every bit of prod- 
 uce they could spare, and making entries in their books 
 showing cash taken in. They charged themselves, too, 
 at the market rates for all they ate. They were get- 
 ting the farm spirit, Tom said. We found Mrs. Faville 
 in the corn, digging for bait, apparently. 
 
 "Oh, Mr. Dunham," said she, as we drove up, "do 
 you know anything about the corn-root worm ?" 
 
 I stopped and thought a moment. Did I really know 
 anything about the corn-root worm? As a matter of 
 fact, most of us old farmers don't — ^we know we ought 
 to study these things, but we don't. We drift. Mrs. 
 Faville had me. I who had grown corn all my life, 
 plowed for it, harrowed its seed-bed, planted it, culti- 
 vated it, husked it, fed it, and eaten it, and who had 
 probably lost thousands of bushels of it by the ravages 
 of the com-root worm, had to confess that I didn't 
 
166 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 know anything about the miserable insect — if a worm 
 is an insect. 
 
 "Well, I do congratulate you!" gurgled Mrs. Fa- 
 ville. "That comes of your scientific farming. But we 
 poor ignorant beginners — ^we have a plot of corn here 
 simply infested with corn-root worms." 
 
 "Tom," I asked, "what kind of bug did Marian tell 
 me your classes found in my corn this year?" 
 
 "Corn-root worm," said Tom dryly. "Your field is 
 badly infested." 
 
 And then Mrs. Faville, courteously shifting the dis- 
 cussions, began showing me corn-root worms, of which 
 I had plowed out thousands and never knew what they 
 were, and exhibiting com plants suffering from their 
 attacks, and explaining the methods by which their 
 ravages can be controlled. The embarrassing thing 
 about it was that these greenhorns knew far more 
 about the blamed pest than I did. I had been too busy 
 growing corn to study my subject. 
 
 "Next year," said Tom, as we drove home, "I'm go- 
 ing to let them grow twenty acres of com on their own 
 farm by their own labor, allow them to work one team, 
 a fourteen-inch stirring plow, a corn cultivator, a disc 
 harrow, a forty-tooth drag, and a few other tools. I'm 
 going to let them keep one sow and her pigs, a cow 
 whose calf they must raise on skim-milk — and, gener- 
 ally, I'm going to let them have a little skeletonized 
 farm to run. If they don't get sick of it, and can show 
 results in the way of payment for their labor, to say 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 167 
 
 nothing of interest on investment, I'm going to let 
 them move out on to the farm the year after." 
 
 This we call the Faville system for getting back to 
 the land ; the other is the Fogg plan. The Faville sys- 
 tem has its points of superiority over the Fogg plan, 
 since it gives the back-to-the-Iander more reading to do 
 and enables him to confoimd old farmers like me with 
 catch questions about bugs and worms. It is a system, 
 too, that could be adopted by thousands, if not milHons, 
 of city families without breaking up their family ar- 
 rangements. It gives the back-to-the-lander a reduced 
 facsimile of farm experience. It is about the same 
 sort of preparation for farming that a study of litera- 
 ture is for writing. The com and wheat and vegetables 
 are agricultural themes, and the things actually eaten 
 or sold are agricultural themes which sell to the editors 
 — such things sometimes take place, I am told. But 
 the Faville system, while it is a good preparation for 
 farming, is not farming. 
 
 The Fogg system is — and that makes it in my opin- 
 ion the true admiralty chart of the route to Backtothe- 
 landia. It can't be followed by many men and women 
 who have families ; which may prove the truth of the 
 statement that he travels the fastest who travels alone. 
 The families with the craze must be contented with the 
 Faville system, or something not as good. But as for 
 me, give me the system we hit upon that day when we 
 were up against the job of advising Wilberforce Fogg. 
 
 When Millie had been working for us for nearly 
 
168 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 two years Wilberforce came to me for a talk about his 
 plans. He was still working on the Harry Wade place, 
 and getting forty dollars a month. Wade had inherited 
 so many interests in Illinois that he was remaining 
 there, and his dairy was for sale. 
 
 "I won't buy it," said Wilberforce, "as long as I can 
 hold the job of running it at forty a month." 
 
 "Why not?" I asked, pleased to hear him laying 
 down the law in such a confident way. He certainly 
 had learned ! 
 
 "Why," said he, "the fellows who rent land are get- 
 ting more labor income all over these parts than the 
 men who own their farms. The only reason why you 
 have a better income than I is because you have a big 
 investment on which you have to be allowed interest 
 on the books at the rate of five per cent. Now I cal- 
 culate that until a farmer has so much money that he 
 is glad to accept a return of five per cent., he had better 
 rent land than buy. Of course, I am not even a renter, 
 yet ; but I am shaping things up so I can take a lease 
 when I can get a good one. In the meantime I am put- 
 ting away money faster than I ever did in the box fac- 
 tory at a hundred a month. If it weren't for one thing 
 I'd rather stay on at forty than to risk starting in for 
 myself on a rented farm with only the equipment I 
 can buy with what I have." 
 
 "And that one thing is— Millie?" 
 
 Fogg nodded. There were tears in his eyes. 
 
 "There ain't many girls " he started, and then 
 
 choked up. 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 169 
 
 "No," said I, "there ain't many girls would do what 
 she has done for you. And, Bill, you will make a great 
 mistake, maybe, if you keep holding off too long. You 
 never will be as well equipped as you'll want to be. 
 I advised you once against starting in as a farmer, 
 and " 
 
 "Yes," said Bill, "and you have saved both of us 
 from shipwreck. We'd have lasted just one season on 
 a farm of our own, green as we were." 
 
 "But now," I went on, "you know the game well 
 enough to be careful. You ought to be a pretty good 
 dairyman and farmer by this time, for you've been go- 
 ing to a mighty good school ; but Millie is a first-class 
 farmer's wife right now, if she had the chance she's 
 entitled to. She has served her apprenticeship. She'll 
 stick, and she'll make good. Where you had one chance 
 in a hundred to make good when I first saw you, you 
 have nine chances out of ten to win now. From a 
 money point of view, your ideas as to waiting are cor- 
 rect; but you didn't come to the Fairview neighbor- 
 hood to make money. You wanted to get out into the 
 open, and make a living, you said. Don't advance 
 your ambitions from month to month so that they 
 defeat their own ends. Marry Millie — ^and make the 
 Dunham family sore at you for taking her away, dam 
 you — but marry her, my boy, marry her." 
 
 "Uncle Abner," said he, gripping my hand, "I'd have 
 been willing to pay a lawyer a hundred dollars for that 
 piece of advice. But I'd have been afraid it wasn't on 
 lie square. You and Tom Whelpley liave; worked me 
 
170 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 up to the point of worshiping success in fanning in- 
 stead of my God, and loving it so much that I was 
 afraid to give up to my love for my girl !" 
 
 "Well," said I, "if that's the case, we have been 
 overplaying our hands. How long can we keep Mil- 
 lie?" 
 
 "I swear to goodness," said Wilberforce, turning 
 pale, "if I ain't afraid she'll make me wait now as long 
 as she's had to, I'm scared to death !" 
 
 Which system has proved more efficient, the Faville 
 system or the Fogg plan? We can't tell, yet The 
 Favilles have had a year of full management of their 
 farm, and did pretty well. I think they made about 
 as good returns as the rest of us, though they made 
 several expensive mistakes. But they were cheerful, 
 and they have perfect confidence. Theip son and 
 daughter actually engage in farm work, and that is the 
 hardest test there is of acdimatization to Backtothe- 
 landia conditions. The Favilles are a mighty good in- 
 fluence among us, because the doctor, while he says he 
 has retired from practise, really has become the health 
 adviser of the neighborhood, and has done more to 
 clean up insanitary conditions than any one else in the 
 county, Mrs. Faville is coming to realize that the 
 farmers' wives are not very different from the women 
 with whom she iassociated in town — ^and altogether the 
 Favilles are merging with the F^irview landscape very 
 nicely. They will not fail. 
 
 As for the Foggs, there couldn't be any doubt of 
 their success with Millie on the job. I believe, after 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 171 
 
 all I have done to give him right ideas, that Wilber- 
 force Fogg would run off after fads and into ruin if 
 it weren't for Millie. I went over there the other day 
 for something — they rented the Wade place on some 
 system which gives them half the increase in the 
 herd, and the chance to buy as they can — and observed 
 through the row of willows back of the house a struc- 
 ture which looked like one of the lath traps we used 
 in the early days for trapping prairie chickens. I 
 peeped through the hedge and saw maybe a quarter 
 of an acre all roofed over with lath about two inches 
 apart and seven feet or so from the ground. 
 
 "What in tunket," said I to Millie, "is that lath con- 
 traption back here?" 
 
 Millie laughed, and shook her finger at me warn- 
 ingly. , 
 
 "You're not supposed to see that," said she. "And 
 I promised Billy I wouldn't tell you. He promised me 
 that if I would consent to this one indulgence he would 
 stop talking about mushrooms, rhubarb in the cellar, 
 Belgian hares, and fat-rumped sheep. You've got to 
 give a child his own way once in a while. Uncle Ab- 
 ner!" 
 
 "Yes," said I, "that's all right— but what in time 
 is it?" 
 
 Millie put her cupped hand to my ear and whispered 
 into it, "Ginseng !" 
 
 Now then, here is the conclusion of the whole mat- 
 ter of people migrating from the cities to the farms 
 as we see it here in the Fairview District — and we've 
 
172 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 investigated it, and discussed it, and tried some experi- 
 ments. We say to the back-to-the-lander : 
 
 Spend as much time in preparation for the farm as 
 you would for the practise of any other skilled trade 
 or profession. 
 
 Make this preparation both mental and physical. 
 The mental preparation consists in learning the rudi- 
 ments of fanning through actual, daily, serious con- 
 tact with them. 
 
 Don't invest a cent of money in the business until 
 after this preparation has been completed. 
 
 If you have any notion of asking others to share 
 in your, life on the farm, see to it that they, too, are 
 put through a course of getting used to it — for to 
 many city-bred people life on a farm is only another 
 name for everlasting torture. 
 
 The cheapest and best way to learn farming and 
 become used to its experiences is, for a man to work 
 on farms as a hired man until the business takes on 
 system and order and attractiveness in his mind, and 
 seems worth while. For a woman, work as a hired 
 girl in a farm home is the best preparation. Most city 
 people will get disgusted with the life and flee back to 
 the pavements — ^but better by far have this happen be- 
 fore the inevitable step than after. Sounds like advice 
 against a hasty marriage, doesn't it — ^and it is a good 
 deal the same thing. 
 
 For those who are so situated that this plan is not 
 practicable, the preparation should be made by a year, 
 or, preferably two years, of actual personal work in 
 
ADVENTURE IN BACKTOTHELANDIA 173 
 
 cultivating gardens and plots of the staple crops ex- 
 pected to be grown on farms; and of rearing fowls, 
 pigs or other stock as opportunity offers. Every one 
 of these operations should be accompanied by a close 
 study of the matter in books and bulletins under com- 
 petent advice. 
 
 After Ais two years' course, during which the fam- 
 ily's city income will not have ceased, the family should 
 take a lease of a farm for two to five years, buy the 
 necessary stock and equipment, and put its ability to 
 make good to the test. 
 
 Whichever method is adopted — and there are many 
 variants of both — ^the capital of the family should not 
 be invested in a farm until after the course of prep- 
 aration is over. 
 
 City people take the matter of going back to the 
 land lightly; I want them to take it seriously. It would 
 be hard to find any one subject on which ignorance is 
 more fatal ; and I should like to see the education of 
 city people along these lines carried on in some sys- 
 tematic manner. Only let nobody get the idea that 
 the education can be acquired in the city. Country life 
 ideas decay and become noxious under urban condi- 
 tions. Bring the city people to the country or they 
 can never, never become acclimated in Backtothelandia. 
 And in any case the Ginseng Virus may persist in their 
 systems from the time when they imbibed misinforma- 
 tion from the reckless and ignorant public prints. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 
 
 THE way we farmers are being uplifted by the 
 city people all over the country is as touching as 
 it is gratifying. Our State Bankers' Association has 
 appointed a Committee on Agriculture, and is holding 
 meetings in luxurious parlors of metropolitan hotels, 
 figuring out what ails tjie people of the Fairview neigh- 
 borhood. I think I could give them some significant 
 hints. If they will come out here and look us over 
 right on the ground I'll undertake to teach them in 
 half a day's drive how to tell in a minute as we pass a 
 farm just what ails it. If it has a gone-to-seed look 
 as to fields, and buildings that look as if they were 
 struck with leprosy, it is probably owned in the county 
 seat, and most likely by a bank director or some re- 
 tired farmer. If it is in good tilth, well fenced, nicely 
 kept, well equipped, spruce, bright, and occasionally 
 given a little but not too much to beautification, it is 
 owned by the man who works it. 
 
 For all that, we are glad to have people studying our 
 problems, the chief of which are non-resident ownership 
 and the retiring nature of our yeomanry. We suspect, 
 though, that we people who live on the farms will prob- 
 ably have to solve our own problems. We like city 
 
 174 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 175' 
 
 folks, and will always gladly raid the chicken house 
 and the strawberry bed for the pleasure of setting them 
 down to a table of wholesome country fare ; but when 
 they try to do things for us we get furious. We don't 
 like to have them do things to us, either. But if they 
 will come out and take us by the hand and do things 
 with us as man to man, both hunting humbly and un- 
 selfishly for the answer to a riddle which is as impor- 
 tant to the city as country, we'll go along with them in 
 amity to the end of the road. 
 
 But the/ve got to know more about us than they 
 can learn from their rolltop desks before they succeed 
 in working any great revolution in rural life. A per- 
 son who never sees us except through the bars of a 
 banker's cage, or across a cotmter, or from behind a 
 lawyer's desk, is likely to fire high, wild and crooked 
 when he tries to shoot rural folly as it flies. The other 
 night at the schoolhouse, for instance, we had a speech 
 by Mrs. J. J. Faville, a lawyer from the county seat, 
 and sister-in-law to our Doctor Faville. She repre- 
 sents about the average of city intelligence on rural 
 affairs. Her subject was Sex Rebellion. She told us 
 that the factories have taken away the women's work, 
 and that "half the race, disinherited of its priceless 
 privilege of labor, demands its share in the activities 
 of a reconstructed society." The gas and electric light 
 company, she said, relieves the woman of the job of 
 dipping candles. The mills rob her of the task of mak- 
 ing clothes. They also homswoggle her out of the 
 priceless privilege of grinding com in a mortar, curing 
 
' 176 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 meat, making soap, rendering lard, and all the rest of 
 it. You know how the feminists talk. Why one would 
 have thought from what she said that all the women 
 in the country, except the women wage-earners, are 
 obliged to sit day after day twiddling their thumbs 
 for lack of something to do. 
 
 N But we let anybody under the sun talk anything on 
 earth at our new consolidated school auditorium. Tom 
 Whelpley, oiu" Principal and the Neighborhood Man- 
 of-AU-Work, says it's democratic, and that the school- 
 house platform must be an open forum. At first we 
 shied at some things; but after Adolph Tulp, our 
 thoroughly-Americanized German blacksmith, musi- 
 cian, artist, carpenter, and chief teacher of handi- 
 crafts, worked an anarchist in on us under the name 
 of a "voluntarian," and he spoke to a full house on 
 the evils of government — ^any government, mind you 
 ! — and it didn't seem to do any harm, we decided that 
 we wouldn't draw the line in the future on an3d;hing 
 not actually obscene. So we had a good crowd at the 
 sex rebellion talk by the female lawyer, and enjoyed it. 
 Especially the chicken supper the girls of the domestic 
 economy class served after the speaking, so as to earn 
 credits in their course in domestic economy. 
 
 Well, it was funny to watch those farmers' wives 
 sit and listen, to that talk on woman's need of some- 
 thing — anything, O Lord, anything ! to do. Mrs. J. J. 
 Faville was doing the best she could, but she didn't 
 realize the conditions in the average farm home. Wil- 
 son Beebe's wife, who is a suffragist, as, to tell the 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 177 
 
 truth, most of us are, though not an insurrectionist, 
 had got Mrs. Faville there, and I was sorry for her 
 once or twice. 
 
 "I speak," said Mrs. J. J. Faville, "for the millions 
 and millions of women who are reaching out to this 
 man-made society and crying 'Give us back our work !' " 
 — and my wife broke out into a little giggle that broad- 
 ened over the audience into a sort of general guflfaw. 
 We men didn't laugh quite as heartily as the women 
 did, but we laughed — ^and Mrs. Beebe turned all colors. 
 As for Mrs. J. J. Faville, she hoarsened her voice a 
 little more, the way they do when engaged in public 
 speaking, and never tumbled. She went on to say that 
 the men have taken from the women every job they 
 ever had except that of wet-nurse, and that the baby- 
 food people are out after that. We men were able to 
 laugh again at this, and without that sneaking expres- 
 sion on our faces which we had when the speaker of 
 the evening lamented the paucity of women's work. 
 
 Well, I think I can see her side of the case. I have 
 a brother practising medicine in Moline, and his 
 women- folks have mighty little productive work to do, 
 just as Mrs. Faville said. And yet, dishwashing, and 
 sweeping, and dusting, and making beds, and frying 
 meat and cooking eggs and doing in general what 
 cooking the delicatessen miscreants have left — ^all these 
 are just about as productive in Moline as they are in 
 Fairview; but I don't notice that the women- folks in 
 the family of Doctor Dunham of Moline go to them 
 with any more of a glad cry than does the wife and 
 
178 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 daughter of Abner Dunham of Fairview. In fact, 
 they seem to feel disgraced if they are caught at work. 
 They hate like sin — ^and I sometimes think worse — ^to 
 answer the door-bell when the maid happens to be on 
 strike. What they want seems to be something differ- 
 ent from what they have rather than work. They ap- 
 pear to me to be in the same frame of mind as a man 
 who makes the rounds of places where drinks are sold 
 to find something, as he says, that "will hit the spot." 
 I don't know much about these city women who are said 
 to be yearning for their share in the productive work of 
 the world, something to take the place of the task of 
 grinding the corn, dressing the skins, and planting the 
 beans which savage women discharge; but they seem 
 to me to be just plain fed up on life and hunting for 
 a new beverage which hits the spot. Maybe I'm wrong 
 — and as a matter of fact the wives of a lot of drum- 
 mers who travel out of our town, and the railroad men's 
 wives, and many others, live pretty empty lives. Their 
 arms are empty, too, mostly; and I sort of suspect that 
 when a woman's arms are empty the vacuum is pretty 
 likely to spread over a good part of the field of life, 
 like a patch of cockle-burrs. (N. B. — Since this was 
 written the war and war's work has changed these 
 things a little — ^but that's only an interlude.) 
 
 Doubtless there's a lot in this question that I'm just 
 plumb ignorant of; but I do know that Mrs. J. J. Fa- 
 ville brought her oratorical pigs to a mighty poor mar- 
 ket when she came to the Fairview Public Assembly 
 room with that talk about the women wanting work. 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 179 
 
 There were nineteen automobiles parked about the 
 schoolhouse yard that night, besides a lot of teams un- 
 der the hitching shed; but my wife couldn't count up 
 three women in the audience who had any hired help 
 in their houses, and Emmie Henderson is one of the 
 two she counted. That's why we men felt a Httle 
 sneaking when we joined in the laugh at the speaker's 
 expense — an expense accoimt which she never paid, by 
 the way. 
 
 Farming is still one business in which wives and 
 children are an economic asset, instead of a liability. 
 Some young men engaged in farming say they can't 
 afford to marry ; but there are more of them who can't 
 see their way clear to take leases of farms until they 
 are. I could name a dozen men in the neighborhood 
 who are rich because of the labor of their wives and 
 children. A hired man or a hired girl may leave, but 
 wives and sons are steadier help. We used to hear a 
 song — I believe it was sung in the school — which 
 shows that these facts got themselves embodied in 
 verse, proving that they were generally recognized as 
 valid arguments by the immigration agents. "To the 
 West ! To the West !" it began, and then 
 
 "Where a man is a man if he's willing to toil, 
 And the humblest may gather the fruits of the soil; 
 Where children are blessings, and he who has most 
 Has aid in his fortunes and riches to boast ; 
 Where the young may enjoy and the aged may rest — 
 Away, far away to the land of the West !" 
 
 And it was against an oversupply of work and noth- 
 
180 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 ing to do it with that the first case of sex rebellion 
 came to the Fairview neighborhood. That is what I 
 started to tell about, but it reminded me of Mrs. J. J. 
 Faville's meeting and the difference between her sort 
 of sex rebellion and Emmie Henderson's, Emmie is 
 my wife's niece. Her husband, Charlie Henderson, is 
 the son of old J. B. (John Bull) Henderson, one of 
 the old settlers and an Englishman. He was a fair 
 farmer; and what with the increase in the price of land 
 and one thing and another, he left Charlie in pretty 
 good shape; but Charlie took a flyer at keeping a store 
 and leaving the farm to renters ; and when the sex re- 
 bellion broke out he was badly mortgaged up; and he 
 and Emmie and the children had been back on the farm 
 for several years, and were gradually gaining on their 
 debts, and working like dogs as a matter of course. 
 
 So I was surprised one day — a. fine, windy May day 
 right in the midst of corn-planting — ^to see Charlie and 
 Emmie drive into the yard in their Concord buggy. I 
 knew that every hour was precious to Charlie, for he 
 was late with his plowing and short-handed. They 
 came just after we had finished dinner, but they 
 wouldn't eat. Emmie and her aunt went into execu- 
 tive session, while Charlie after trpng to discuss the 
 season, the prospects for hay and a few other burning 
 issues, gave it up and sat silent. He looked as if he 
 had lost his last friend, but I could see that he did not 
 want to talk about it. Presently my wife came to the 
 door of the room and asked me to come in. "Bring 
 Charlie, too," said she. 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 181 
 
 Emmie was sitting on the bed, but the prints of her 
 were on the counterpane, and there were wet spots on 
 the pillow. I looked at Charlie with the gaze a man 
 gives another just before he says, "Are you crazy, or 
 an infernal scoundrel? A man with as nice a little 
 wife as you have to act like that — ^what do you mean 
 by it?" You know how we talk to each other at 
 such times. Somehow, though, Charlie didn't look as 
 though he had been up to that kind of meaimess — ^he 
 just looked beaten and crushed. 
 
 "Where's that paper, Emmie?" asked my wife, just 
 as if it had been the third degree. Emmie handed her 
 a paper, and my wife gave it to me, while Charlie 
 averted his eyes as from something unspeakably hor- 
 rid. I took it, and read that in view of, and whereas, 
 and wherefore, and that is to say, Charlie had given 
 his note for twelve hundred dollars for a lot of farm 
 machinery junk, and had been duly constituted agent 
 for several counties for the Tornado Stalk Cutter, the 
 Holeproof Mower, cmd the Never-Work Horse Rake 
 • — as I remember the names, using therefor a memory 
 notoriously inaccurate. Anyhow, it was perfectly clear 
 that Charlie had given a note for twelve hundred, and 
 the machinery was at the station. 
 
 "How did you come to do this ?" I asked. 
 
 Charlie blushed and stammered. He didn't quite 
 know. He had had an attack of sick headache to 
 which he was subject, and went to town for some medi- 
 cine, and after getting some relief met a fine-looking 
 man, who took hitn pyer to the hotel, where the fine- 
 
182 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 looking man and his beautiful wife had taken Charlie 
 into camp for twelve hundred dollars. Emmie was 
 furious and tragic by turns. I think the beautiful wife 
 of the fine-looking man had something to do with her 
 fury; for Charlie had been a deuce of a fellow in his 
 time; and the tragic fits came on when she thought of 
 the ruin which she saw in the twelve hundred dollars 
 of absolute loss. 
 
 "What have you done about it?" I asked. 
 
 "As soon as I talked the matter over with Emmie," 
 said Charlie, "I saw I had made a fool of myself " 
 
 Emmie reached over and patted his hand. I suspect 
 that this was Charlie's first admission that the transac- 
 tion was not a perfectly defensible one. 
 
 "' ^and I went to town and tried to find Mr. De 
 
 Haven and his wife." 
 
 Emmie frowned. 
 
 "But they had left within an hour of the time I 
 signed the papers. He told me this note was only a 
 matter of form. Uncle Abner " 
 
 "Yes, I know," said I, "but as a matter of form what 
 did you then do?" 
 
 "I went to all the banks and warned them not to buy 
 that note." 
 
 "None of them had?" 
 
 "None." 
 
 "Good," said I ; "the sympathies of the jury will be 
 against any outsider." 
 
 "I'll go on the stand apd swear," said my wife in a 
 kind of medico-legal ecstasy, "that Charlie Henderson 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 183 
 
 is mentally irresponsible when he has one of those sick 
 headaches !" 
 
 I'd have given a dollar to have dared to suggest that 
 sick headache and Mrs. De Haven combined were 
 enough to carry any man off his feet, as well as throw 
 him off his head ; but I didn't dare. 
 
 "I'm afraid you're not an expert, Ma," said I. 
 
 "Well, I've had enough to do with darned fool men, 
 so I ought to be able to qualify if any one can !" she 
 retorted — and I dextrously shifted the conversation 
 back to the Henderson crisis. 
 
 "Well," said I, "of course you'll fight, Charlie, but 
 you'll probably have to pay the note." 
 
 "And costs, and attome/s fees !" groaned Emmie. 
 "Oh, Uncle Abner, we never, never can do it! And 
 after all these years of toiling and worr)ring and deny- 
 ing ourselves everything, just as we could begin to see 
 a little light after all our losses — ^to have this happen !" 
 
 "I wish," said Charlie, "that I had deeded you the 
 farm the day we were married !" 
 
 "If you'd done as you agreed, Charlie Henderson, 
 I'd have had something now to take care of myself and 
 my little children with !" 
 
 It developed in the course of the little spat that en- 
 sued that Charlie had told Emmie, who was a milliner, 
 that he believed a wife should have her share of the 
 income as it came in, and anyhow, he meant that as a 
 wife she would never have less money week by week 
 than she had as a milliner. 
 
 "He wrote me that," said Emmie, "and I believed 
 
184 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 he'd do it. But I know now that it was a pretty hard 
 thing for a farmer to do, and after a little while a 
 pinch or so of hard times pinched off my income, and 
 it never sprouted again." She giggled hysterically at 
 her own jest. 
 
 "Have you got that letter!" exclaimed my wife. 
 
 "Why, yes, Auntie," said Emmie. "I've all of 
 Charlie's letters." 
 
 "Deed her everything you've got!" said my wife. 
 "It won't half pay her. You owe it to her legally. Do 
 it before that note turns up in some shark lawyer's 
 hands. Do it to-day !" 
 
 Well, my wife is nobody's fool when it comes to a 
 business matter, and Charlie made the deeds. He gave 
 her bills of sale and deeds, and became a hired man. 
 It wasn't necessary, though, as it turned out; for 
 within a week Mr. De Haven was arrested at Spring- 
 field; and though Charlie's note wasn't found among 
 his papers, it never turned up, and is outlawed long 
 ago, if it ever was valid. That's the prelude to the 
 Henderson story. 
 
 Time then proceeded to roll on. Charlie con- 
 tinued to work the farm just as he always had done, 
 and the transfer of his property didn't seem to hurt his 
 standing any; because everybody knew the circum- 
 stances, and gave him credit for being honest. Credit 
 among farmers and between them and bankers is more 
 a matter of the family and the farm, anyhow, than a 
 question of the ins and outs of the record of transac- 
 tions. Probably the banks would have given Charlie 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 185 
 
 credit all the more freely because he took measures to 
 fight a swindler instead of knuckling down. Besides 
 he was twelve hundred dollars nearer solvent than he 
 would have been if he had paid up a debt for which 
 he had got nothing. Lawyers said that the transfer 
 was perfectly good, too, under our laws as they then 
 stood, and my wife felt as pleased as Punch whenever 
 we talked about the Henderson matter and her advice 
 to Charlie to settle his antenuptial contract first and 
 await the De Haven onslaught second. 
 
 But Charhe Henderson didn't seem so pleased. He 
 was himiiliated every time he thought of the De Haven 
 foolishness. He blushed and cringed every time he 
 was told by any business man just to let his wife sign 
 these papers with him. But he still was afraid to take 
 the title of his own property, because that note had 
 never appeared, and until it was outlawed by lapse of 
 time an "innocent purchaser" might turn up with it any 
 old moment. In fact there were three or four sharks 
 in town, and an indeterminate number of them else- 
 where, whom Charlie Henderson visualized as search- 
 ing the records daily for the transfers from Emmie 
 back to him, so as to jump him with summons, lis pen- 
 dens, and attaclpient. He wasn't out of the woods; 
 but as years rolled by he could faintly see glimmer- 
 ings ahead of the openings between the trees. 
 
 In the meantime, things were continuing to improve 
 with the farm. Charlie went into dairying, and built 
 a whale of a bam, and a good silo. He had every 
 improved machine he could get for his field work — 
 
186 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 binder, silage cutter, corn harvester, pumping engine, 
 feed grinder, the most advanced styles in planters and 
 cultivators; and was seriously thinking of a tractor 
 plow, when the women's club held its momentous ses- 
 sion after the burning of Hugh Clark's house. That 
 very day he had said to his wife, thinking that the 
 statute of limitations would soon have run against that 
 ghastly note : "It isn't very pleasant to have to come 
 to you to have every paper signed." 
 
 "No," answered Emmie, "I don't suppose it is." 
 
 "To be just the same in law as hired help in your 
 own home, but without any fixed wages, and bound 
 to stay through thick and thin, and with all the respon- 
 sibility a person carries is — it kind of gets on a fellow's 
 nerves," ventured Charles. 
 
 "I know just how you feel," answered Emmie. "I 
 stood it for eleven years." 
 
 "But it's different with a man," said Charlie. 
 
 "Is it !" said Emmie, with the falling inflection and 
 the emphasis on the "is." 
 
 Charlie never admitted in his mind that her implied 
 challenge had anything in it; but all the same he took 
 half a day to the job of crawling up out of his boots. 
 
 I think Emmie's sense of justice was sort of in- 
 flamed and congested that day, for she went to the 
 meeting of the women's club in the lecture-room in 
 the new schoolhouse all het up inwardly and simmer- 
 ing. She found Mrs. Frank Wiggins — our minister's 
 Daisy wife — presiding. The meeting was doing some- 
 thing rather queer, most people would say — ^holding a 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FMRVIEW 187 
 
 session of the architectural section on the rebuilding 
 of Hugh Clark's house. Tom Whelpley, the principal, 
 had organized the Fairview Cooperative Fire Insur- 
 ance Company, of which he was secretary, and this be- 
 ing the first loss, was present to assure Mrs. Clark, and 
 the rest of the women, that the money to pay it in full 
 would be ready on the next Saturday; and Adolph 
 Tulp, artisan in-ordinary for the district, was there with 
 a lot of plans for up-to-date farmhouses which he had 
 gleaned from architectural books and farm papers, and 
 with about twenty designs made as class exercises by 
 the older pupils in the school, and one of his own which 
 followed pretty closely a rough plan given him by the 
 Clarks. Mrs. Clark was there; and they were buzzing 
 like a beehive, each as much interested in the new 
 house as if it had been her own. 
 
 That's the way we do things in our district since 
 Frank Wiggins and Tom Whelpley gave us the facili- 
 ties. Lots of folks think that these two, a teacher and 
 a preacher, and especially Daisy, and to some extent 
 Maude Ackerman, who has become mighty important 
 to us all, and especially to Tom Whelpley since she 
 came back to the neighborhood as one of our teachers 
 — lots of folks say that they bamboozle us and make 
 us do as they please. But we are a conservative peo- 
 ple, and mighty set in our ways, and we do just as we 
 please. We are noted for pulling together for the 
 common good, and some lunatics say we have the most 
 completely "socialized" neighborhood in the country; 
 but as a matter of fact if we do things differently from 
 
188 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 our old ways it is merely that in Daisy and Maude and 
 Frank and Tom we have four hired people who can 
 run errands for us and organize labors which other- 
 wise wouldn't be done at all. This saves us a great 
 deal of time, and, of course, it makes these four peo- 
 ple pretty prominent; but any one who thinks we old 
 fogies don't know just what we are doing at every 
 turn of the road has another guess coming. 
 
 This meeting on Hugh Clark's new house, for in- 
 stance — it was nothing on earth but organized gossip. 
 It was the ordinary chatter about a new house, only 
 Daisy Wiggins had bunched it in a meeting, and 
 Adolph Tulp had furnished it with drawings and esti- 
 mates, and it was getting somewhere. It was just the 
 same with my new hog-house last fall — we had every 
 design ever seen, and yet I held to my original idea 
 except for Wilson Beebe's scheme for letting in the 
 sun, and Bert Wiley's idea for putting sawdust instead 
 of sand in the concrete for the feeding floor to keep 
 the hogs from getting rheumatism on account of the 
 cold character of ordinary cement mixtures. We go 
 to sghool to each other a lot, in the Fairview neighbor- 
 hood, and that's the whole secret of our progress — ^but 
 we don't let any one run us. 
 
 They decided that the bathroom should be finished 
 in that white cement that costs so much less than tile, 
 and is perfectly sanitary, and should have a door open- 
 ing on the veranda, so that Hugh and the men could 
 go in and bathe before really coming into the house — 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 189 
 
 and at the same time it would be convenient for use 
 from the inside. 
 
 "Bathroom!" burst out Emmie Henderson. "My 
 idea of heaven is a place filled with pretty children, 
 and bathtubs of soft water — ^hot and eold. I congrat- 
 ulate you on your fire, Mrs. Clark !" 
 
 "Oh, thank you!" replied Mrs. Clark, just a little 
 embarrassed at Emmie's remark. "And have you seen 
 the way we get the water all over the house, and with 
 so little expense ?" 
 
 "Veil," said Adolph, "de expense alvays overesti- 
 mates us. It may cost a liddle more." 
 
 "I'd like," said Emmie, "to have a definite proposi- 
 tion from Satan to give me for my soul running water, 
 hot and cold, in my kitchen — or to mortgage a few 
 years of my life for it." 
 
 "Well," said Daisy, "the thing that seems to give 
 us the most trouble is the lighting system." 
 
 "Lighting system?" said Emmie, interrogatively. 
 " 'Had I lain for a century dead,' you would find my 
 hands smelling of kerosene from filling lamps. Are 
 there such things in the world as lighting systems — for 
 farmers' wives?" 
 
 "Well, Emmie," said my wife reprovingly — for Em- 
 mie is her sister's girl — "ain't you getting a little free 
 with remarks about serious things?" 
 
 Emmie gave a short kind of laugh and didn't reply. 
 Charlie, her husband, drove up in his little car to take 
 her home when the meeting would be over, having been 
 
190 ( JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 to town after some castings for a disk harrow; and 
 sat down in the back part of the room alongside Hugh 
 Clark. He and Hugh and Adolph Tulp were the only- 
 men there, Tom Whelpley having made his financial 
 report and gone up-stairs to his school work. 
 
 "Well," said Daisy, as the time came to adjourn, 
 speaking in that bright and bubbly way of hers, "I'm 
 sure this has been a perfectly splendid meeting. We 
 shall all feel a warmer neighborliness toward the new 
 Clark house, because we have all had something to do 
 with making it just as nice as it can be. We'll feel to- 
 ward the house a little as an artist does toward a pic- 
 ture he has painted — it belongs to some one else, but 
 there is something of him in it. Why, as new houses re- 
 place old ones, if this architectural section of the 
 women's club continues to work out the plans and ar- 
 rangements, this will be a neighborhood of little farm- 
 house masterpieces. And the owners won't love them 
 much better than the neighbors do — and I can't think 
 of an)^hing nicer than that ! Has any one any sugges- 
 tions as to our next program? If not " 
 
 Emmie Henderson rose. "Madame President," she 
 said, "the remodeling of our house has become an 
 imperative necessity. It has been decided that this 
 work must be done immediately. I should be very glad 
 if the architectural section will take up the plans at 
 its first meeting. Of course," went on Emmie, gazing 
 steadily at Charlie, who was looking wildly from one 
 person to another as if to verify his own impressions 
 as to this incredible enormity — "of course I have ray 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 191 
 
 own plans and have had for many years. Just as 
 Monte Cristo, or the Man in the Iron Mask, or the 
 poor wretches in Libby Prison thought about escape 
 when it seemed impossible that it could ever come, and 
 even planned for it when their plans appeared quite 
 outside the field of reason, so, I believe, every farmer's 
 wife who is sentenced to hard labor for life in a house 
 like ours makes plans for a better one. I have, I know, 
 for years. I think I should have dropped in my tracks 
 like a camel who decides that the load is too heavy for 
 him, if I couldn't have planned. But I have heard so 
 much here in the way of helpful suggestions that I 
 don't want to miss having the benefits of the common 
 thought. Everybody knows more than anybody. And 
 you, Mr. Tulp, I want your help especially, and if your 
 high-school classes can, under your direction, help out 
 with estimates, drawings and suggestions, I shall be 
 very much obhged to you and the school." 
 
 "Ve vould be almost glad to pay you for the prob- 
 lem," said Adolph. "It iss ferry valuable work for the 
 school. Ve do not get enough of it to do — and in our 
 high school ve dislike the problem vich iss not related 
 to actual life. Perhaps you vill give us some cheneral 
 idea of vat you mean to do in water supply, lighting, 
 and such things." 
 
 "The intention is," explained Emmie, with rising 
 color, as she noticed the gathering wrath as well 
 as horror in Charlie's expression, "to make the house 
 and the woman's side of the farm as convenient as the 
 bam, and the man's field of work. This means some 
 
192 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 central lighting system to relieve me of the disgusting 
 and never-ending task of filling, cleaning and lighting 
 kerosene lamps. It means a central heating system 
 which will take off my hands the barbarous labor of 
 shoveling soft coal into sooty stoves and keeping my 
 mind on what fires we have when the men are out of 
 the house in cold weather, and which will heat the 
 house evenly all over, and thus rid us of the draughts 
 and physically shocking changes of temperature in win- 
 ter caused by the fact that only a portion of the house 
 is heated at all. It means some arrangement for saving 
 me the choice of hanging out my clothes on an outdoor 
 line at the risk of my life in bad weather, or making 
 the house unfit to live in by putting them up in the 
 rooms. It means a modern kitchen, with a dish-wash- 
 ing contrivance of some kind, and water always hot to 
 use in it, a good kitchen cabinet, a refrigerator with 
 ice always on hand, a gasoline or oil range, tireless 
 cooker and a linoleum floor. It means a thoroughly 
 sanitary modern bathroom. It means a mangle for the 
 clothes, and a washing-machine — ^both run by motors 
 of some sort. It means the removal of the milk and 
 cream from the house, and it means milking machinery 
 — ^the whole thing to be run by the men. It means a 
 house fit to live in! If I can get domestic help I ex- 
 pect to have it as soon as I have a house with a maid's 
 room in which I can ask a human being to live in the 
 winter; but there will be times when I shall not have 
 help; and this house must be replanned to make my 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 193 
 
 work just as easy as it is humanly possible to make it 
 on a farm." 
 
 "About how much," inquired Adolph, who had been 
 making notes, "do you expect to spend on this interest- 
 ing work?" 
 
 Charlie Henderson had been gripping his chair for 
 five minutes, and as Emmie went on with her horrify- 
 ing list of demands as astounding to him as were 
 Japan's to Yuan Shi-kai, he slowly rose, so that as 
 Adolph asked his epochal question Charlie was about 
 three-fourths standing. He paused in his attitude of 
 pugilistic crouch, with a good deal of the pugilist's ex- 
 pression on his face — ^paused to hear his wife's esti- 
 mate of cost. 
 
 "We expect to spend," said she, looking right at 
 Charlie, "about twelve hundred dollars — ^with the in- 
 terest on that amount for five years !" 
 
 Charlie dropped back into his seat as if he had been 
 shot. People looked at one another in bewilderment for 
 a moment; and then those significant glances began to 
 pass from eye to eye which showed that they under- 
 stood that the duel which they had witnessed between 
 Charlie and Emmie related to that transfer of the Hen- 
 derson property to the wife. The mention of the sum, 
 and the five years' interest, left the work of our ama- 
 teur Hawkshaws pretty easy. Emmie had rebelled. 
 She was taking the bit in her teeth. She, as the owner 
 of the farm and the personal property, was going to 
 remodel the house whether her husband agreed to the 
 
194 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 project or not. And right there sex rebellion started 
 in the Fairview neighborhood. It was rebellion, not 
 of the sort described by Mrs. J. J. Faville, Attorney 
 and Counselor at Law, the rallying cry of which was 
 "More work !" but a crusade for less work, more help, 
 and better equipment in the homes. The light of battle 
 spread from face to face. Daisy Wiggins, who was 
 one of the -latest to understand what was taking place, 
 felt the tension, and began to talk in some soothing 
 strain to let things down to their normal level. 
 
 The situation was saved by Tom Whelpley, who 
 came in just at the last, and hearing something about 
 washing machines, introduced the subject of a coop- 
 erative laundry. He and Miss Falk, our teacher in 
 domestic economy, and the big girls in the school, to- 
 gether with Adolph Tulp's boys, had been making plans 
 for a laundry to be run in connection with the school. 
 There would be one or two hired people, but a lot of 
 the work would be done by the students of domestic 
 economy, and the boys could construct the building 
 with some hired assistance, and install the machinery. 
 If they would start a cooperative creamery at the same 
 time, said Tom, the overhead would be cut down, and 
 the experience in one or two places in Minnesota and 
 Wisconsin showed that the two establishments fitted 
 into each other like a finger in a glove. It would all 
 be truly educational, too, and a significant development 
 of what the world was beginning to call "the Fairview 
 idea." 
 
 Amidst this diversion the Hendersons escaped and 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 195 
 
 went away in their flivver; and then Tom saw that 
 something kept the women from paying attention to 
 what he said, and the meeting adjourned — ^but the 
 laundry-creamery project had been started, and will 
 be in operation within three months. That's the way 
 we do things in Fairveiw; show us a good conserv- 
 ative, common-sense proposition and we hop to it. 
 Washing and butter-making are really collective jobs — 
 why saddle them on our women-folks ? 
 
 Nobody knows just what took place between Emmie 
 and Charlie; but it is known that they went clear 
 around by the old Simons schoolhouse, got home late, 
 and acted like lovers coming home. Emmie tells my 
 wife that she stood pat and told Charlie that she was 
 going to make those improvements, and he might as 
 well make the best of it. She had the property, and 
 she guessed the property was good for it. He said he 
 couldn't afford it. She said if they couldn't afford to 
 make life worth living for her and her children she 
 wouldn't stay on the farm another year — ^anyhow, he 
 never held back from bu3ring things he needed in his 
 work. He argued that he never bought anything that 
 didn't add to the earning capacity of the farm. She 
 retorted that if her health and comfort and everything 
 that makes the difference between a slave and a free 
 white person was to be sunk in the mire of earning 
 capacity, she was ready to quit. She would not live a 
 life that put a woman so far below a dollar, so there ! 
 
 Well, as a matter of fact, I don't blame him for 
 giving up. They really couldn't afford the outlay, but 
 
196 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 they maHe it, and they Hved through it, and the only 
 thing I see in which they have been the worse for it is 
 their inabihty to show as great a "labor incbme" on 
 Doctor Spillman's balance sheet as they could have 
 done if they hadn't rebuilt the house. I'm sorry that 
 the books can not be made to show happiness. If we 
 all lived in dugouts there would be less investment on 
 which we would have to earn interest before Doctor 
 Spillman's investigators will give us credit for "labor 
 income." I believe Emmie did Charlie a real favor in 
 making this fight just as she did, rather than to make 
 his life a burden until he left the farm and took her to 
 town, as so many farmers' wives have to do in pure 
 self-preservation. 
 
 Women run the world after all ! They don't run it 
 this year, but their grip on the years hence is unshak- 
 able ; and we can never have a firmly-established coun- 
 try life with the women rebellious and dissatisfied, as 
 so many of them are. To be sure, according to Mrs. 
 J. J. Faville, the women in the cities are rebellious and 
 dissatisfied, too; but there's nowhere for them to go, 
 while there's always the city beckoning to the country 
 woman. The current is running toward the city any- 
 how ; and it's a whole lot easier to stop the driftwood 
 in the mill-pond than on the riffles. 
 
 Then, as I said before, and as a conservative busi- 
 ness man, I repeat it, the women of the farms are 
 economically important. They feed the men that till 
 the farms; and until men can go to work without 
 breakfast and to bed without supper, the women who 
 
SEX REBELLION IN FAIRVIEW 197 
 
 feed them have to be given credit for their share in 
 the growing of crops. The food they preserve is no 
 small item in the national wealth. And as for produc- 
 tion, the women and children of Iowa, for instance, 
 sell more eggs every year than the entire orange crop 
 of the United States is worth — and if you don't 
 think the orange business amounts to something, go to 
 Washington some time when there is a tariff bill up. 
 The orange growers will make more fuss than all the 
 women in the Mississippi Valley. Why, when you give 
 the women of the rural districts credit for what they 
 do to make it possible for the men to work, and for 
 what they actually produce in good tangible wealth, 
 their economic importance is just as great as that of 
 the men. 
 
 I shouldn't make this distinction if it were not the 
 immemorial habit of the world to make it. In neigh- 
 borhoods like ours it is just as impossible to segregate 
 the economic value of women from that of men as to 
 tell whether it is the oxygen or the hydrogen in the 
 water which quenches thirst. I suspect that except 
 among wage-earning classes the case is different in the 
 cities. The farming business, however, rests on the 
 conservation of the woman crop. In making that 
 statement I'm putting it on a pretty low basis; but 
 anybody with a grain of sense can see the humanities 
 of the case. We feel different in our neighborhood, 
 too, since Emmie's rebellion set up a regular fever for 
 better things in the house. We were easy marks for 
 a long time after that for plumbers, agents for house- 
 
198 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 hold machines and equipment, and dealers in building 
 supplies. We're all glad of it now, though, but it was 
 a stressful time at first. 
 
 At the best, the farm is no place for the lazy or 
 frivolous woman, but we can prove to you that it is 
 a good place for women of intelligence, refinement, 
 some learning, a lot of public spirit, and good looks. 
 And much of our condition — ^which we are assured is 
 rather exceptional — dates from that day when Emmie 
 Henderson laid the foundation for the celebration of 
 the fifth anniversary of the day when Charlie became 
 acquainted with the seductive Mr. and Mrs. De Haven. 
 
 She celebrated it in her remodeled home by laying 
 on CharHe's plate the deeds and bills of sale which 
 legally wiped out the whole De Haven episode. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 
 
 THE very first Fairview story I wrote, you re- 
 member, dealt with Herman Lutz^ who 1^ re- 
 tiring to spend his remaining days in the ease and 
 comfort of the city did all he could to cut down, as I 
 think, the number of his days and found little ease or 
 comfort. You remember, too, I hope, the vague ref- 
 erence to that handsome daughter of his, Kate, and 
 her way, all unfitted as she was for that sort of life, 
 of finding ease and comfort in towns and town life. 
 Well, I thought then that Kate Lutz had passed from 
 the life of the Fairview settlement forever; but she 
 returned a few months ago, like one of those comets 
 with an uncertain period of revolution, and passed 
 away again. In passing, she flooded the mind of one 
 old mossback of a farmer with a lurid light which will 
 not fade for a long time ; and she may have done some- 
 thing for the girls she left behind her. 
 
 It was this way. I came in from the field one day, 
 imhitched my horses, watered them, and went into the 
 house for a siesta on the sofa before supper, when I 
 found Daisy Wiggins, the minister's wife, waiting for 
 me. 
 
 "How de do, Daisy," I remarked. 
 
 199 
 
200 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 "Pretty well. Uncle Abner," she replied. And then 
 for a long time there wasn't anything said. I stretched 
 myself out for my nap, thinking that Daisy was using 
 the sitting-room as a waiting place while time ripened 
 some arrangement between herself and my wife. Fi- 
 nally, however, she opened the discussion. 
 
 "Uncle Abner," she inquired, "how are the crops ?" 
 
 "Pretty fair," I replied. "The corn is backward on 
 account of the cool weather, but it's clean of weeds, 
 because it has been dry and the cultivation has killed 
 them. Hay is a short crop; but the hot season is just 
 coming on, and the com is sure to boom if we get what 
 August generally gives us; and we can make up in 
 silage what we lack in timothy and clover. The price 
 of cattle is off — ^the beef trust is trying to drive tis all 
 out of business, I guess — ^but the hogs will probably 
 keep us about even with the board in live stock. I have 
 a notion to quit the beef game and go into dairying. 
 The fellows that sell cream and milk are beating me 
 all hollow. But if everybody goes into cows, won't 
 there be an overproduction of dairy products? I can't 
 see any solution of the farmer's problem, Daisy, 
 and " 
 
 "Mercy!" said she, and then: 
 
 "What are the farmer's greatest problems, Uncle 
 Abner?" she queried. 
 
 "Making a Hving on the farm, and putting a little 
 aside for a rainy day. Getting fair profits out of the 
 land without robbing the soil. Beating the hardest 
 game — ^^" 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 201 
 
 "How's the girl crop in Fairview, Uncle Abner?" 
 
 I sat up and stared at her. She was looking at me 
 with the same expression— determined, and at the same 
 time excilted — ^with which she addressed me when she 
 first brought the Reverend Frank to us and stated that 
 they were going to become pioneers again, as her great- 
 grandfather had been in the old Fairview settlement; 
 only they were determined to be pioneers in rebuilding 
 the state their forefathers had builded. They were go- 
 ing to become missionaries in the Com Belt, trying to 
 make our faltering rural Christianity work again 
 through a new and really rural sort of rural church. 
 She had the same sort of holy audacity in her manner 
 now that she had when they flim-flammed me out of 
 that fifteen acres of marsh which Frank drained and 
 made into a glebeland attached to the Fairview Meet- 
 ing House. 
 
 "How's the girl crop in Fairview?" she repeated, 
 seeing me gaping at her with nothing to say. 
 
 "Why," said I cautiously, for I knew there was some 
 sort of catch in her question, "I dunno " 
 
 "You don't know !" she repeated, as if accusing me 
 of crime. "You don't know ! And neither does any 
 man in this district. But you know about hay and 
 corn and silage and cattle and hogs ! And yet the girl 
 crop makes a dreadful failure of the life of the whole 
 neighborhood if it fails. 'How much then is a man 
 better than a sheep ?' " 
 
 "Not much," said I, "but sheep and goats look after 
 their crop of girls in their way. What's the trouble?" 
 
202 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 "Uncle Abner," said she, "I want to go to Saint 
 Paul, or Minneapolis — I never can remember which — 
 and on to Fargo ; and I want Maude Ackerman to go 
 with me — and I haven't the money ! And if I under- 
 take to explain why we want to go, you'll think it's 
 foolishness — and it is the deepest wisdom!" 
 
 "Well," said I, "I used to give my boys and girls a 
 quarter once in a while and tell them to spend it fool- 
 ishly; it seemed to sort of make up for the times when 
 people gave them nickels with the caution that they 
 were to see that they spent them wisely. That always 
 made the gift worthless to me when I was a boy. The 
 children called them their foolish quarters. Does little 
 Daisy want a foolish quarter ?" 
 
 "Call it that," said she. "It won't cost so very much. 
 I know college people at both places that have asked 
 me to visit them oceans of times ; and they'd be glad 
 to have Maude go with me. Do you think a special 
 fund could be collected, and no questions asked ?" 
 
 "I suppose," said I, "that I may say that it concerns 
 the Fairview crop of girls ?" 
 
 "You may if you like," said she, "but it will help 
 the boys and women and men as well as the girls. 
 Such things always do. And I won't say that this trip 
 is actually and essentially necessary to our cam- 
 paign—" 
 
 "So it's another campaign, is it?" 
 
 "Yes; and Uncle Abner, it grows out of the neglect 
 of the girl crop in Fairview. It grows out of the fact 
 that we've been forgetting that farm girls aren't quite 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 203 
 
 the same as farm boys. This neighborhood has become 
 noted among the countrysides of the United States as 
 being the home of the Fairview Idea in country Uving; 
 but the Fairview Idea is not complete." 
 
 "What blight or mildew has struck the girl crop 
 in Fairview?" I asked. "I haven't noticed anything 
 wrong. I think we have the nicest, prettiest, whole- 
 somest lot of girls we've had in the neighborhood, since 
 I went courting — of course the girls were a notch 
 higher then. What's the matter, Daisy?" 
 
 "They look happy to you, do they?" 
 
 "They certainly do." 
 
 "And they are happier I hope than the girls were 
 when Frank and I came, and before Tom Whelpley 
 began building happiness into the very basis of our 
 neighborhood life by filling everybody's mind with the 
 wonder and mystery and challenge of farm living 
 through a truly rural rural school. But girls want 
 something more." 
 
 "Something more?" 
 
 "Something different." 
 
 "Well, by George !" I ejaculated, "I like their nerve ! 
 You can't satisfy a woman! It's impossible! Why 
 when I think of the way your great-grandmother used 
 to live—" 
 
 "Now that will be about all on that Une, Uncle Ab- 
 ner," said Daisy. "My great-grandmother rode in the 
 covered wagon and shared the storms and risks of the 
 prairies. But she stood by my great-grandfather's 
 side, and they fought the same fight — exactly the same. 
 
204 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 fight. There was nothing he expected to achieve which 
 she did not expect to share. Life was simpler then. 
 There were no great cities just beyond the horizon; 
 and who knows, anyhow, what her discontents were as 
 she looked out at the stars from the bed under the 
 wagon? You never can satisfy women? Of course 
 not ! Every woman, every girl, is a true daughter of 
 the horse-leech, and cries 'Give ! Give !' from birth to 
 death. We of the Fairview neighborhood have been 
 giving them much; but too much of it — ^and Frank 
 and I have been partners in the mistake — ^has been 
 economic. Too much in the way of canning clubs, 
 scientific agriculture, milk, butter, pigs, calves, colts, 
 soils, and marketing. Not enough of the light that 
 never was on land or sea. Do you understand? Of 
 course not ! I- myself scarcely understand." 
 
 "I think I have some notion," said I. "Having no 
 wings, a woman wants to fly ; without the mermaid's 
 nature, she nevertheless wants to dive to the unfath- 
 omable ; without any special efficiency she wants to do 
 the undoable ; without much of a brain — any more than 
 the rest of us, anyhow — she wants to know the un- 
 knowable; and though everybody knows she hasn't a 
 bit of mechanical knack, she wants to unscrew the un- 
 scrutable! That's women for you! And when she 
 can't satisfy these yearnings she pouts, and blames it 
 on farm life. Your great-grandmother Raymond car- 
 ried water from the spring, cooked the meals,, suckled 
 her children, and didn't care whether the unscrutable 
 was unscrewed or not. And I wish all our girls were 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 205 
 
 back where she was. It would simpKfy matters a whole 
 lot!" 
 
 I spoke with some heat. I hadn't indulged myself 
 in primitive man's ancient luxury, an outbreak against 
 women, for years and years. It comforted me. A lit- 
 tle sex antagonism is a part of the game of life, I 
 reckon — ^anyhow it comforted me, even while the first 
 little wave of shame rippled through my consciousness. 
 Daisy giggled, just as she always did sooner or later in 
 any serious discussion. 
 
 "Poor Uncle Abner !" she purred. "Has to live in 
 a world half full of darned old women!" 
 
 "Shame!" said I. 
 
 "Just what I say !" she agreed. "But let me tell you 
 a little of this thing that I don't understand. A girl 
 — for remember we are discussing the girl crop — olives 
 two lives. So does a boy. So does everybody, I 
 guess; but let's consider for a moment a girl's secret 
 and sacred life. It is a life of marriage and giving in 
 marriage. Even the oldest old maid marches to the 
 altar often and often in her inner life. It is habitual 
 with her. A girl may not know what it is that she is 
 all the time dramatizing in her visions, and may even 
 deny to hers;elf that she does this thing of which I 
 speak ; but she does it, all the same. The white-veiled 
 figure beside the knight in armor looks like an angel 
 or a fairy or a princess as the girl beholds the cortege 
 passing on with bursts of music and the scent of orange 
 blossoms — ^but it is she herself every time." 
 
 "That's not peculiar to girls," said I. "Much you 
 know of boys, Daisy !" 
 
206 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 "Well," said she, "this I know: Boys' natures are 
 more satisfyingly filled with acres and crops and live 
 stock than are the nature of girls — or they seem to be. 
 The boys in Fairview are happier than the girls — 
 though I admit we have made things some better for 
 the girls too. But girls hear of the great world out- 
 side as a place of delicious mysteries. They read more 
 than the boys do, and they read of the romantic and 
 wonderful things that happen to girls in cities. They 
 sing more than boys do, and they always sing of love 
 -^somehow our song writers never find an)^hing else 
 worth singing. They clip and keep poems — always 
 love poems. Girls need art!" 
 
 "Art!" said I. "Crayon enlargements of photo- 
 graphs ? Oil paintings from studies that you pay fifty 
 cents for and are always prettier than the paintings 
 from them? Burnt wood? 'God Bless Our Home' 
 and 'What is Home without a Mother' in colored yarns 
 on perforated paper? Calla lilies and American 
 beauties on plaques? We've had all of these since I 
 was a boy — ^and none of them seemed to prove Bor- 
 deaux mixture for our inward blight." 
 
 "You're invaluable to me, Uncle Abner," said Daisy, 
 "You react so accurately to every test in the average 
 manner! Did you ever hear of dramatic art?" 
 
 "It's what the fellows do who paint the scenery in 
 theaters," I answered, very promptly. 
 
 Daisy giggled again, and said I was a hundred per 
 cent. Philistine, net. 
 
 "Girls," said she, "ne;ed little accomplishments, so 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 207 
 
 tHat wHen the boys come around they may do things 
 which will lift them above, or at least seem to put 
 them outside the common life. So much they impera- 
 tively need, or they fail to give the boys their due by 
 being mysteries, Uncle Abner." 
 
 "Mysteries!" I exclaimed. "The^re worse than 
 that. They're conundrums. Man was the conundrum 
 of the ancient philosophers, and woman is the conun- 
 drum of to-day. We can't guess her " 
 
 "But you'll never give her up, will you. Uncle Ab- 
 ner !" cried Daisy — ^and then we both giggled together. 
 
 "And you think," I inquired, "that you can bring 
 some of this mystery for the girls back from the prai- 
 ries of Minnesota and North Dakota ?" 
 
 She nodded affirmatively. 
 
 "It doesn't look reasonable to me," said I, "and I 
 don't think it will look plausible to the men of the 
 church who'll have to make up this expense fund. 
 Maybe you'd better tell me more about your plans." 
 
 "Do you want me to have a foolish quarter," she in- 
 quired, "or must I not only spend it wisely but tell just 
 how I shall spend it before I get it? Is that the way 
 you give quarters to be spent foolishly?" 
 
 "I guess the fellows will leave it to you and Maude," 
 said I. And so they did. 
 
 Daisy and Maude went on their journey, and Abel 
 Bohn and the others who made up their small purse 
 kissed their money good-by ; and laughed among them- 
 selves at the queemess of women, even such sensible 
 women as Daisy Wiggins. At the same time we were 
 
208 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 curious about their errand, and I sent to Minnesota and 
 North Dakota and got all the literature of their Ex- 
 periment Stations I could beg, but none of it seemed 
 quite in point on the girl proposition. Finally they 
 returned, after writing to Adolph Tulp from some- 
 where near Bismarck to call a meeting of the Neighbor- 
 hood Club at the assembly room of the schoolhouse for 
 Friday evening. 
 
 That was a Monday. Tuesday we cut our second 
 cutting of alfalfa; and Tuesday night it rained and 
 spoiled it, Wednesday I couldn't see why any one 
 should be a farmer, and walked over to have a talk with 
 Frank Wiggins ; and to look at that fifteen-acre patch 
 of glebeland, now growing enough celery, potatoes and 
 cantaloupe to support Frank and Daisy and their two 
 babies — ^with the addition of the milk from three 
 Guernseys, which never went out of the little bam ex- 
 cept for exercise, and yielded over ten thousand pounds 
 of milk each a year. There were some mighty nice 
 swine and poultry about the place, too ; and I loitered 
 as I came in by the back way from my own fields, and 
 looked things over. It was as prosperous a little farm 
 as I ever saw ; and while it did not prove to my mind 
 that intensive farming ought to take the place of 
 extensive farming in the Corn Belt, it did set me think- 
 ing and querying as to whether or not Doctor Spill- 
 man's finding of facts for extensive farming is neces- 
 sarily the last word on the subject, when I heard the 
 murmur of voices in the manse — Frank's voice, Dais/s 
 and another. I tapped on the kitchen door, and getting 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 209 
 
 no reply, went on in. This is the custom. It is like 
 entering the house of your son or your father, you 
 know! 
 
 I stepped to the door of the little parlor, and was 
 met by Frank in a way that suggested that he had sud- 
 denly started up to bar out intrusion. 
 
 "Hello, Uncle Abner," said he, making awful faces, 
 and motioning me away. "Glad you came ! I want to 
 show you the prettiest litter of pigs " 
 
 "If that's Uncle Abner Dunham," said a voice — 
 not Daisy's — from within, "bring him in. I want him to 
 have the pleasure of meeting the lost sheep." 
 
 I went in, and saw, seated in Daisy's best wicker 
 chair, a young woman who looked incredibly strange 
 there, and yet familiar. I knew her in a minute — she 
 was Kate Lutz! She was dressed in a flimsy, sleazy 
 stuff which looked like an imitation of something ex- 
 pensive, and something not meant for wear in the 
 country unless at a party, or something of that sort — 
 kind of out of place, you know, but pretty for all that. 
 Her skin was pale ; she looked well-fed, but sort of soft 
 like a horse that's stood in the bam all winter and had 
 no exercise, but has been kept on full feed. Her face 
 was made whiter by powder, and her eyebrows and 
 lashes were jet black. So was her hair. There was 
 paint on her cheeks — just a little — ^and her lips were 
 too red. She looked a little desperate, probably on 
 account of the whites of her eyes showing so much, 
 like an excited heifer's — ^but I could see that with this 
 girl it was her ordinary expression. She rose as I went 
 
210 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 in, and offering her hand, said, "How's every little 
 thing. Uncle Abner? Kill the prodigal; the calf's re- 
 turned!" 
 
 I took her hand, and held it while she looked me in 
 the eye quite steadily, but as if she found it a little diffi- 
 cult. 
 
 "You're Herman Lutz's girl, Kate !" said I. 
 
 "Correct, Sherlock!" she replied; "sit down and see 
 these good people take me apart. And after tin 
 autopsy, we'll talk about Aunt Lucy." 
 
 I sat, but none of us could say anything at first. 
 Then Daisy began, quite as if talking of some absent 
 person. "Kate is a Fairview girl," she said, "who has 
 left us, as a great many other girls would like to leave 
 us. She and I are trying to get at the heart of the 
 problem." 
 
 "This, then," said I, "is a part of the study of what 
 ails the girl crop of Fairview?" 
 
 "Well," said Kate, "you'll never do anything to make 
 things better. The best the farm girl gets is the worst 
 of it ; but it's a comfort to know that some one's getting 
 wise to the fact that something's the matter. When I 
 was here nobody thought a girl's life worth studying. 
 It was, 'Here, young woman, take that dish-cloth and 
 get busy, and no more whimpering around ! What do 
 you want, anyhow ? As good a home as you've got — ^I 
 should think you'd be ashamed ! When I was your age' 
 — and the rest of it. And I s'pose it's the same yet. 
 Poor kids ! And at that they're a darned sight better 
 off than some of us, if they only knew it. But some 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 211 
 
 things you'll never know till you've stuck your finger 
 into the machinery." 
 
 She laughed, a laugh which was too loud and de- 
 fiant. Her voice, even in speaking, was rougher and 
 more brassy than I like to hear. 
 
 "Were you as pretty," asked Daisy, "as a young girl 
 as you are now ?" 
 
 "As I am now?" Kate laughed again, that same out- 
 of-tune brassy laugh. "Say I like that! I was as 
 pretty, if I'd had any style to me, as a red wagon. I 
 was some kid, wasn't I, Uncle Abner?" 
 
 "Yes," said I, "you were." 
 
 "Past tense from honest old Uncle Abner!" said 
 Kate with another laugh. 
 
 "Every girl, almost," said Daisy, "is pretty in one 
 way or another, and knows it. How did your beauty 
 effect your feeling toward the farm ?" 
 
 Kate sat silent. For the first time she had no ready 
 answer. 
 
 "Did you feel that farm life robbed you of your — 
 your — " Daisy hesitated. 
 
 "My market?" asked Kate — and then hurried on. 
 "Why not in them words. I just felt that in the city 
 I'd meet more people. I felt that I'd be in society like 
 what I used to read of — ^wouldn't that simply assassi- 
 nate you !" 
 
 "I see," said Daisy. "You'd meet more people in 
 the city who would like your looks. And perhaps 
 among them would be the man who would make you 
 his idol!" 
 
212 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 "Sure to be, I thought," said Kate. "Oh, I was the 
 prize boob ! But what did I know, with a family that 
 thought that if I had clothes on my back and plenty to 
 eat it was all I needed !" 
 
 "I suppose," went on Daisy softly, "that you were 
 all the time waiting for adventure, and never having 
 it come to you ?" 
 
 Evidently this was too subtle for Kate, for she re- 
 peated the word "adventure" and stopped. 
 
 "Things never happened to you on the farm ?" 
 
 "Never !" said Kate. "Ever)rthing was dead, dead ! 
 I wanted life. I wanted beaux. I wanted to be in 
 things in which the boys and girls could mingle, and 
 flirt, and dance, and sing, and play around together. 
 While I was from twelve to fifteen, I was happy, be- 
 cause I could play with the boys like a boy; but after I 
 had to put on long dresses, and when I got to looking 
 like a woman, all that was over. Then the boys never 
 came around except to spark — ^and I hated that. I 
 didn't want to get married and have a raft of kids, and 
 wash dishes and bake and roast myself over a stove or 
 a washtub all the time, and make butter and fret and 
 stew and mop and iron and mend and make and slave 
 all the time and never stick my head over the front gate 
 except to go to church and hear old Preacher Brown 
 spell Hannah one Sunday and spell it backwards the 
 next!" 
 
 "I'm afraid," said Frank, "that all of us preachers 
 are in danger of falling into the habit of spelling Han- 
 nah backwards. Don't be too hard on us !" 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 213 
 
 "Oh, you're all right," said Kate. "I wish I'd been 
 able to do as Parson Brown said, at that. But I 
 couldn't. I simply couldn't" 
 
 "There wasn't any fun in his religion," said Frank. 
 
 "Fun !" scoffed Kate. "Say, when there's fun in re- 
 ligion, good health will be catching !" 
 
 "Both things are true," said Frank, "if we only 
 knew!" 
 
 "Things are different here now, Kate," said I. 
 
 "Not as different," said Daisy, "as they will be !" 
 
 "Well," said Kate, "sometimes things get bad for a 
 while, and then take a turn and get worse ; but I'll bet 
 you haven't made any changes in Fairview to make it 
 any rottener for the girls." 
 
 "Did you know Ethel Wyatt ?" I asked. "Her father 
 was a renter in your time, and lived over near the Wil- 
 low Creek ford." 
 
 "Sure, I know her," said Kate. "Little homely thing 
 that was always going around with her nose in a book. 
 What has she done?" 
 
 "She's married long ago," said I, "arid still lives on 
 the old place. Her husband bought it, and is paying 
 for it. She seems to be happy. She writes for the 
 farm papers on the beauties of farm life. She studies 
 birds, and insects, and plants. She is a nature lover, 
 and is so active in the women's club — " 
 
 "Well," said Kate, "them that likes bug hunting, and 
 learning the first names of flowers and birds and snakes 
 are welcome to all they get out of it. But excuse me !" 
 
 "Ethel is one of the sort for whom farm life was 
 
214 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 always the most pleasant in the world," said Daisy. "I 
 mean the nature lovers and those to whom the sunrise 
 is a poem. I'm sorry thdre are so few of them. We 
 can't run things for that kind alone, or we'll run into 
 ruin." 
 
 "Give me people," said Kate, "or give me death," 
 
 "Me, too," said Daisy. 
 
 "And," went on Kate, "I guess getting your fill of 
 people is about the same as the other thing." For the 
 first time, she showed signs of emotion. She brushed 
 her handkerchief across her eyes. "Well," she went 
 on, "I guess I'll have to step on the accelerator. The 
 fellow I swiped that flivver from may get out a posse." 
 
 "Oh, I guess not !" said Daisy. 
 
 "I guess not, too," said Kate ; "but I must trot along 
 all the same." 
 
 "I'm having a plate put on for you," said Daisy. "I 
 want you to stay. Would it have helped you if there 
 had been dances — ^nice dances, where the old folks go 
 and take their children home, and there is a musical 
 programme, or maybe a lecture or a picture show, and 
 something to eat?" 
 
 "It would have helped a lot," said Kate, "if I could 
 have had pretty dresses to wear, and my folks would 
 have taken me. They didn't believe in dancing, though." 
 
 "You hated housework?" asked Daisy. 
 
 "I sure did," said Kate; "why, I used to wake up 
 in the night to hate it !" 
 
 "If you could have belonged to a canning club, and 
 raised tomatoes or peas or corn, and sold the crop, 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 215 
 
 canning what you could of it, and competed for prizes, 
 and maybe received a free trip to the state capital, and 
 probably to Washington — ^and had your own bank ac- 
 count, and lots of meetings, and instructions in the 
 work — ^would that have helped ?" 
 
 "Why," Kate hesitated as if considering, "why, I 
 think these things would have been fine ! Anything — 
 oh, lord, anything — to make things sociable, and sort 
 of human!" 
 
 "And, when you were in school in Fairview, if there 
 had been a graded school, such as we have now, with 
 several teachers, and many pupils, and classes in cook- 
 ing, sewing, gardening and the like — ^and everything 
 planned to make you think of the problems of farm life 
 as things to be worked out and improved — don't you 
 believe," asked Daisy, "that it would have made things 
 more interesting?" 
 
 Kate looked the question over doubtfully. "Well," 
 said she, "a little schooling went a long ways with me, 
 and a little farming a darned long ways. But maybe 
 I could have seei!Ksomething in them. I don't know." 
 
 "But if you had had socials in the schoolhouse, and 
 all the people of the neighborhood there to talk things 
 over, with maybe people there from town, and a din- 
 ner, cooked and served by the girls, and a general good 
 time — ^wouldn't you have found fun in that?" 
 
 "Yes," said Kate, "I see what you mean. A Hve 
 place instead of a dead one. I'm lively, myself ; and I 
 used to like things clean and lively at the same time. 
 God knows there ain't any fun in the meanness people 
 
216 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 get into while they're hitting things up. It's the hitting 
 it up that's fun. Yes, I can see that if you have all these 
 things, a girl such as I used to be might be happy here. 
 And I might not have been so infernal dtunb in my 
 studies. I was good in geography for a while, and I 
 used to be the best reader in school, until I got sore 
 at everything. And speak piieces — ^why, I was a shark 
 at it!" 
 
 "Well," said Daisy, looking over at me as if she 
 was opening a new move, "suppose we had had a reg- 
 ular Little Country Theater here, with our regular pre- 
 sentation of plays — splays written by farmer folks for 
 farmer folks; not the feverish plays of the cities, but 
 real studies, even though a little crude, of our own life 
 by folks like us — — " 
 
 "Oh, that would be out of sight !" cried Kate. "Say, 
 do you know, my greatest ambition has been to act? 
 There is a man — I may as well tell you, he's the feller 
 that owns this car I sHpped away with from town — 
 that thinks he can get me into the movies ! He says I 
 have the most expressive face ! But I suppose it's bunk 
 like everything they tell you !" 
 
 "I've just come back," said Daisy, "from a trip to 
 Minnesota and North Dakota, where they are begin- 
 ning to have these things. I saw in both states real 
 plays written by farm boys and girls, and played by 
 companies of farm people. I never saw such interest 
 in any dramatic entertainments in my life." 
 
 "Are the plays any good?" asked Kate. 
 
 "They're the best plays ever written in America!" 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 217 
 
 cried Daisy. "But I don't suppose your city theatrical 
 men would do anything but jeer at them." 
 
 "Not if they leave the Ten Commandments in any 
 kind of shape," said Kate. 
 
 "But," said Daisy, "if the audience is a part of every 
 good play, these plays are great. They deal with life. 
 One of them is a play which shows how tmhappy a 
 farmer is likely to be when he retires from the farm 
 and goes to town." 
 
 "Like Pa," said Kate. "He's about as happy, I sup- 
 pose, as a brook trout in a sewer." 
 
 "They have a Little Country Theater at Fargo," 
 Daisy went on, "and are putting on plays there every 
 season which seem to me to be the beginning of great 
 things. Professor Arvold is the enthusiast behind the 
 movement; but the people of those prairies — they are 
 the movement itself. It started with folk dances an^ 
 pageants put on by the immigrants — Scandinavians, 
 Germans, Russians, and other nationalities. The great 
 success which started the movement in a big way was a 
 play of old Icelandic life written and put on the stage 
 by the people of a neighborhood, away out on those 
 bleak prairies, who are mainly immigrants from Ice-^ 
 land. And now, in Minnesota, under the leadership 
 of Estelle Cook, and in North Dakota under Arvold, 
 a new literature, and a new stage art is growing up, 
 as distinctive as one can find anywhere in the world." 
 
 "So that's what you meant by art?" I inquired. 
 
 "Yes, Uncle Abner," said she. "The art we have 
 bungled in the past — the painting, the crayon pictures. 
 
218 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 and the other things of which you spoke the other day, 
 and most of our generally futile business of music les- 
 sons, are pathetic strivings on the part of the little girls 
 and their parents to give them something in the way^of 
 'accomplishments.' Little bags of tricks, they are, for 
 the girls to use in proving to the world and to the 
 young men that they are wonderful girls, and not Hke 
 other farm girls." 
 
 "Little bags of tricks is right," said Kate. "But 
 they don't fool any one." 
 
 "But here is a new art," Daisy went on; "an art 
 growing out of life. What do you think. Uncle Abner, 
 of a play telling how a fanner drove his boy away 
 from the farm by sticking to old-fashioned methods, 
 and how the boy went out into the world and made 
 good by the right kind of fanning; while his father 
 went on losing money and coming to poverty?" 
 
 "It might happen," I admitted, "and then again the 
 old folks might be right, and the boy go broke. But 
 I'd like to see the play, if there is such a one." 
 
 "It's a Minnesota play, called Back to the Farm," 
 said Daisy; "and we're going to put it on in the as- 
 sembly room of the schoolhouse as soon as we can get 
 ready. It was written by a farm boy named Merline 
 Shumway for farmer audiences. It is a success — • 
 among farmers. I hope it never will be anywhere else ; 
 for the worst thing that could happen to these young 
 dramatists is to have commercial success. And Estelle 
 Cook has written another play for the Minnesota cir- 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 219 
 
 cuit, called Kindling the Hearth Fire. It's a good 
 play, too." 
 
 "What's it about?" inquired Kate. 
 
 "About the life you ran away from, and how to 
 make it better," answered Daisy. "Cecil Baker, a 
 North Dakota farm boy, has written A Bee in a 
 Drone's Hive — ^that's the retired farmer play; and 
 The New Liberator is another rural play of the North 
 Dakota school, dealing with the marketing problem — 
 I don't know who wrote that. The rural credit ques- 
 tion is presented in a North Dakota drama entitled, 
 The Prairie Wolf. The people of the farming dis- 
 tricts are crazy about them, because they know what 
 they are about." 
 
 "Gammer Gurton's Needle" said Frank, "and Ralph 
 Roister Doister over again." 
 
 "And Marlowe and Shakespeare over again, too, 
 perhaps," said Daisy. "When thirty million people 
 whose expression of their own life has been suppressed 
 for centuries start expressing themselves nobody can 
 tell what great things may come of it — if they can only 
 escape the blight of New York !" 
 
 "They don't sound very thrilling to me," said Kate ; 
 'T)ut foF hicks, maybe they are just the thing. And I'd 
 give all my old shoes if I was a hick again — ^the kind 
 of hick you seem to be making these 6a.ys. I really 
 must be going." 
 
 "Won't you come out Friday night to help us start 
 this thing?" asked Daisy; "or at least to learn more 
 
220 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 about it? Maybe there's a place for you in Fairview 
 yet." 
 
 "Who, me?" replied Kate, with one o£ her laughs. 
 "No, I'm much obliged. It's too late for Fairview to 
 get me. I'm going back to the drone's hive." 
 
 "Won't you stay to supper?" urged Daisy. 
 
 "No, thanks," said Kate. "I'm just as much obliged, 
 but I must be going. I suppose you think it's funny, 
 me dropping in on you this way; but I drove out on 
 impulse, and seeing this little ranch here, and the new 
 church, I thought I'd stop and see what kind of folks 
 you new workers in the vineyard really are. You are 
 all right ! I wish you'd been here ten years ago. Good- 
 by ! Good-by, Uncle Abner !" 
 
 "You've helped me greatly," said Daisy. 
 
 "And I don't know," said Kate, "but you've Helped 
 me. I guess you have." 
 
 After she went away in her cloud of dust, we talked 
 her over, forgetting the girl crop in our interest in the 
 fate of one spear that looked more like cheat than 
 wheat. Daisy insisted that Kate was not a bad girl, 
 but just a wild and wayward one, and Frank agreed 
 with her. I felt some doubts; though as a matter of 
 fact, while I have known several dullards of the Lutz 
 breed, never one of them had been crooked. As it 
 turned out, we were to hear more of Kate in the days 
 to come. 
 
 This incident was really the beginning of our neigh- 
 borhood work along the lines of the Minnesota and 
 North Dakota ideas. The rest of the story is written 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 221 
 
 in the lives of our people themselves — especially the 
 young folks. Not that the plays themselves are so 
 awfully epoch-making, but the thought that we can 
 make our own plays ; and perhaps our own poetry, pic- 
 tures, statues, and histories some time is a wonderful 
 thing. Really the word "thought" is too strong. We 
 do these things without thinking, and most of all with- 
 out thinking of fame, as Harriet Bohn used always to 
 be doing when she wrote verses before Isaiah married 
 her. She says as much herself. Maude Ackerman 
 wrote several stanzas of verse for a com festival we 
 put on last summer, and mixed her own poetry up 
 with Whittier's Corn Song and that part of Hiawatha 
 that deals with the com myth — and never thought of 
 what Whittier or Longfellow would have thought 
 of the lines she made. I tell you it was a pretty 
 sight to see a lot of Uttle girls and boys dressed 
 up to imitate ears of com giving a regular little can- 
 tata all about the crops. It made us feel proud — and 
 when a fellow from Chicago asked Maude for a copy 
 of her verses she found that she hadn't saved them! 
 He said that Shakespeare was just that careless about 
 his poems and plays. ^ 
 
 I haven't got to the bottom of this thing yet. It is 
 much more important to the girls than it seems. It has 
 loosened our tongues so that we can talk and write 
 indirectly about things that embarrass us when we try 
 to approach them directly. We are getting a little less 
 tongue-tied about sentimental things — ^but I can see 
 that I shall never make myself understood or make you 
 
222 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 see how the new movement is rendering life pleasanter 
 for the girls of Fairview. A talk I had with Marian 
 may make it plain — ^if it does not I shall have to give 
 it up. 
 
 "What do you think of farm life?" I aske'd, 
 
 "Why — I don't know," said Marian. 
 
 "If Clyde Bohn decides to go into the Farmers' Ex- 
 change Bank," said I, "will you be glad or sorry?" 
 
 We still maintain the custom in our part of the coun- 
 try of almost never speaking of engagements. Our par- 
 ents never did. They kept it a profound secret, usually 
 even from their parents, though the boy might tell his 
 best boy friends, and the girl might take one or two 
 girls into her confidence ; but the rest of the world was 
 supposed to be absolutely ignorant that courtship, no 
 matter how open or obvious, was about to result in mar- 
 riage. A young man would sit up with a young woman 
 until two in the morning twice a week for a year ; and 
 when the time came for them to wed, they would slip 
 off in a semi-elopement and come home after a day or 
 so to find the house full of cakes and pies, and her 
 mother in tears. And there was an infare at the 
 groom's home, too, as a general thing. My wife and 
 I ran off in this way, although there was absolutely no 
 reason why we should not have celebrated our wedding 
 with any sort of pomp 
 
 I believe I have it! The American farmer of past 
 days, having lost through pioneer life the knowledge 
 of how the wedding should properly be celebrated, or 
 through mingling of nationalities finding himself con- 
 
JHE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 223 
 
 fronted by the embarrassments of a difference of 
 customs in the traditions of the families concerned, 
 adopted the clandestine way of getting married, to 
 avoid the dilemmas and complexities of doing it ac- 
 cording to any code of social usage. We of the elder 
 day were always embarrassed in the presence of any 
 necessity for ceremonious social observance — ^and it is 
 a good deal the same way in the country yet. Perhjqjs 
 this fact gets close to the reason why the most aban- 
 doned poets and other writers are found among our 
 reserved northern races — ^they prove that reserved 
 races and reserved people are not thereby shown to 
 be cold. Marian blushed at ray question; but she an- 
 swered it fairly. 
 
 "I shall be satisfied either way," said she. "What- 
 ever is best for Clyde will be best for me ; and I think 
 that he is making up his mind that he can do better on 
 the farm than in a little country bank. So I think I 
 shall vote for life on the farm. It's so much better 
 than it used to be before Fairview got to be a 'model 
 neighborhood,' you know." 
 
 Then she threw her arms about my neck, kissed me, 
 and asked me if I loved her. Why was that? I ask you. 
 Why, it was because she was glad to have her romance 
 brought out in the light and treated by her old grandpa 
 as a serious matter, a thing of consequence. Probably 
 girls are like that ; and it would be better for our rural 
 life if we made more of their weddings, their prepara- 
 tions for mating, the greatest thing of their lives. That 
 is why the girls are happier when the neighborhood 
 
224 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 gives itself over to the expression of itself in verses, 
 plays and pageants. It has been a distinct loss to our 
 American country life, this long abandonment of cere- 
 mony and observance. We must build it up again. So 
 I thought that night as I pondered over this almost 
 accidental conversation between Marian and myself. 
 I made up my mind I would talk the matter over with 
 Daisy and Maude. 
 
 If girls live so much in their afifairs of the heart, why 
 should not these matters be made much of, and magni- 
 fied in ceremony, announcement, festivities, and every 
 feature which can lift betrothal and wedding into im- 
 portance in the neighborhood life? Wouldn't these 
 things in themselves give to that life more of the light 
 that never was on land or sea? Wasn't the life of 
 the farm girl suffering from suppression of romance? 
 Weren't we socially too cynical, too afraid of letting 
 ourselves go, too tongue-tied when it came to things 
 tender and intimate; too inarticulate? Couldn't we 
 make life for the girls more attractive if we searched 
 for the things prized by them in those secret dramas 
 of which Daisy spoke; and tried our best to put the 
 orange blossoms and veils into the lives of our girls? 
 It was worth thinking of. 
 
 I couldn't get much out of Marian, who is troubled 
 with the congenital Dunham dumbness as to the things 
 of the soul; and I went about wondering how a re- 
 search worker of the sort that have once or twice come 
 to Fairview to earn doctor's degrees by tabulating us,' 
 would or could go about making a survey of things 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 225 
 
 invisible, impalpable, inarticulate — ^the things tliat,_ ac- 
 cording to Daisy, determine the state of the girl crop. 
 Of course he couldn't tabulate or analyze it; but he 
 could tell with much dullness how a few country teach- 
 ers under the leadership of a Tennessee hill-billy 
 named Tom Whelpley, collaborating with a country 
 preacher and his wife, have successfully introduced 
 pageantry, drama, stagecraft, poetry, and painting into 
 a Corn-Belt farm neighborhood, to the considerable 
 benefit — ^they all use that word "considerable" — of the 
 society. He would get close to the real results by 
 showing that the girls and women have their minds so 
 full of local things in which they take pride and feel 
 a real interest, that they begin to feel a superior sort 
 of pity for their town friends who don't really amount 
 to much in the cities. He would also trace this move- 
 ment back to North Dakota and Minnesota, where the 
 plays I have mentioned, and many others — for of 
 course there are not yet in existence enough native and 
 country-born rural plays to meet the demand — ^have 
 been played to standing room only and with immense 
 success in country schoolhouses with blankets for cur- 
 tains and bam lanterns for footlights. We have a real 
 stage — a little one, to be sure — ^which Tom Whelpley 
 designed when the new consolidated schoolhouse was 
 built. And the plays are really bully. Lots of folks 
 come out from town to see them, and pay their good 
 money for tickets, expecting to see a Cherry Sisters 
 show, and remaining to praise. I'd rather see one of 
 these pieces any time than East Lynne or The Two 
 
226 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 Orphans. Adolph Tulp, who is, of course, scene 
 painter, stage carpenter, and a watchful waiter for a 
 German dialect part, tells me that in a few years we 
 shall have the Passion Play of Oberammergau in sec- 
 ond place. "Nod," says he, "mit superstition, but mit 
 the soul of America in trama ! Excursions vill gome !" 
 
 Daisy has taken pains to tell me that the new dra- 
 matic movement isn't the whole of the campaign for 
 making a better girl crop, and one that will stay on 
 the ground, but is only symbolical of it, and a part of 
 it. She says that the girls and women represent the 
 soul of society more than it is represented by the boys 
 and men ; and that it isn't money, nor fashion, nor good 
 works, nor success that they want, but the chance to be 
 whole women and entire girls. Maybe there's some- 
 thing in it. My wife says there is, and so do most of 
 the women. 
 
 Ethel Fisher — she that was Ethel Wyatt — ^has writ- 
 ten a one-act play for our Little Country Theater, 
 called The Glory of the Soil, which deals with the 
 redemptive power of the love of nature. It is pretty 
 sentimental, from what I hear of it. Marian, my little 
 granddaughter, is working on Jeff Sharpe's story, 
 which she has put into a full four-act play, under the 
 title of The Book-Farmer. That's going to be a cork- 
 ing play if she can do as good a job on the first two 
 acts as she has on the last two. She is writing the play 
 backward, because she says that if she can handle the 
 English scene she can do the rest easily. 
 
 But the sensation of our theatrical history — our 
 
THE FAIRVIEW GIRL CROP 227 
 
 knockout — is to be the one we shall put on next 
 Christmas week, written by Mr. and Mrs. O. Geoffrey 
 Sharpe. I don't know what its name is; but it will 
 have a German dialect part in it for Adolph Tulp, and 
 a star part for Kate Lutz. 
 
 Yes, the Lutzes are with us again. So are the Ack- 
 ermans. The second Ackerman girl takes a place in 
 the teaching force, and Kate is just going to live with 
 her folks. I sold John Ackerman his lot in the little 
 civic center which is springing up about the school- 
 house and the church, and Abel Bohn sold one to Her- 
 man. They will live in their new houses and oversee 
 their farms tmder the management of their sons. Kate 
 is doing any work Daisy asks her to do, and is mighty 
 busy. I wouldn't put it past Daisy to try to make a 
 match between Kate and Adolph Tulp — ^both German, 
 or of German descent, you know, but loyal Americans, 
 and rather fond of each other already. 
 
 Well, why not? Kate would make Adolph happy, 
 and Adolph could be happy with her if she could only 
 keep him at work idealizing her. If I were to write 
 a play, I'd like to take Kate's case as typical of the 
 wrong thing in the girl life of rural America, and call 
 it A Butterfly without Flowers. Not a bad title, is it? 
 But pshaw; I couldn't write a play — ^the neighbors 
 would laugh their fool heads off. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 
 
 yJDOLPH TULP, after he reformed and became 
 JTV. director of metal-working, carpentry, painting, 
 and manual training in the Fairview ConsoHdated 
 Rural School; blacksmith, stage carpenter and scene 
 shifter in the Fairview Littl^ Country Theater, and 
 active in the management of the orchestra, as well as 
 art director in general, became a pretty influential 
 man with us^ — especially after he read his essay, Ger- 
 man Kultur, a Spiritual Poison. Any person may 
 become influential in any community who will work 
 willingly and inteUigently at anything useful, ask for 
 nothing, and bring to the melting pot an occasional 
 ingot of thought. 
 
 Adolph believed fully that he had been saved from 
 a sot's death by the Reverend Frank Wiggins, and 
 Frank's attitude toward community service was such 
 as to give Adolph the impression that he had been saved 
 for and on behalf of the common good, primarily, and 
 for his own soul's sake secondarily ; and in this he was 
 not far wrong. Frank thinks, anyhow, that the two 
 things are the same — ^but he is a heretic. Adolph be- 
 came to our settlement a sort of devoted valet, body- 
 servant, and general utility man, like one of the old 
 slaves of romance, who died thankfully in the service 
 
 228 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 229 
 
 of his master, and could not be driven off. Won't it be 
 a fine thing for the world when every community has a 
 population made up of such people? Probably the mil- 
 lennium, when it comes, will creep upon us unsuspected 
 in the work of a host of such humble public servants. 
 
 Adolph's pet vanity, in spite of his radicalism, has 
 been that his people in Germany are tenants of one of 
 the Kaiser's farms. "Not eff ery farmer," he was wont 
 to say, "can be a tenant to the Emperor. He must be 
 a good farmer; and if he is he will find the Kaiser a 
 good landlord." The fact that the tenant of Wilhelm 
 the Accursed must be a good farmer seems to be what 
 roused Adolph's pride. 
 
 Now, my wife is a landlord. I am not. I have al- 
 ways worked my own farm, largely with the labors 
 of my own hands — ^though I would gladly keep more 
 hired help than I do if I could get good men. My 
 wife's land is a hundred and twenty acres, which she 
 got in the division of her mother's estate, and lies 
 three-quarters of a mile west of our farm — ^too far for 
 economical cultivation from the home place ; and any- 
 how, I like to keep my property interests separate from 
 hers. It works better in the family long run. She had 
 been leasing this farm in the ordinary Corn-Belt way 
 for years, when reformed German kultur in the form 
 of Adolph Tulp came in, and in connection with Brit- 
 ish tradition in Jeff Sharpe conspired to set in motion 
 changes in the relation of landlord and tenant in our 
 parts, which may be very important 
 
 It came through the work of the arithmetic classes 
 
230 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 in the school. Tom Whelpley had started in by making 
 the arithmetic pupils prepare inventories of the family 
 property, and this had grown until the school's classes 
 in mathematics and bookkeeping had become the 
 general counting-room force for the neighborhood. 
 Broadly speaking, all our accounts are kept in the 
 school. To be sure, we keep our own books, such of 
 us as bother to do it; but if we want to know just 
 where we stand on the year's work, or on any branch 
 of it, or even on an individual cow or flock of poul- 
 try, sheep or hogs, we ask Tom Whelpley's kids, and 
 they tell us — as a class exercise, mind you, and they 
 get credits in their course of study for telling us. It's 
 making our boys and girls into mighty sharp young 
 people in a business way. There are less than half a 
 dozen farms in the district, now, the owners of which 
 won't furnish the data for the classes of the school. 
 They don't seem to want their affairs exposed to the 
 neighbors ; but, bless you, every farmer knows pretty 
 well how every other farmer stands financially any- 
 how, and the fellows who keep their figures dark either 
 have something to conceal, we think, or are ashamed of 
 the fact that they keep no accounts. 
 
 School bookkeeping is the finest thing in the world 
 for a farming neighborhood. It is more thorough 
 bookkeeping than any farmer has time to do for him- 
 self, and the doing of the work utilizes labor which 
 would otherwise be wasted on made-up problems in 
 books, and turns it into education for all of us — ^whidi 
 is really the best product of life, when one comes to 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 231 
 
 think about it. Any farmer whose accounts are kept 
 in the school can make a financial statement for Dun 
 or Bradstreet on a day's notice — ^unless the day is Sat- 
 urday or Sunday; for the counting-room of the school 
 goes on all the year round, just the same as the field 
 studies and the live-stock work. 
 
 Now, my wife's tenant was a fellow named Ben 
 Phillips, an honest chap, but we thought not a very 
 good manager. He had been on the place two years, 
 and through the school fimctions he and his family had 
 made a lot of friends. So my wife was vexed when 
 he came around in December and said he couldn't pay 
 his rent. 
 
 "Why not?" inquired my wife. "Crops have been 
 good, haven't they?" 
 
 "Yes," said Ben, "but I had to pay high prices for 
 steers to feed, and the price of beef cattle was off when 
 I shipped. I practically gave my labor to the packers, 
 and got half-price for the com I fed and the concen- 
 trates I bought. Then, you know, I lost some hogs 
 with cholera before the county agent took up vacci- 
 nating them, and that threw me back. Things have 
 gone a^inst me, Mrs. Dunham." 
 
 Well, under American tenant systems the landlord 
 is supposed to get the highest rent he can and send the 
 tenant packing to another farm if he fails to pay. I 
 was surprised to learn from Jeff Sharpe that this sys- 
 tem is what in Britain is called by the horrible name 
 of rack-renting. We have been rack-renting our ten- 
 ants as much as we can from time immemorial in the 
 
232 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 Com Belf, and all the time awfully sorry for the Irish, 
 the Poles and other peasants of rack-rented Europe! 
 Once an Irish drill sergeant gave the command, "Pri- 
 sint Arms !" to an awkward squad. They came up in 
 all shapes. "Hivins!" he shouted, "what a prisint! 
 Three steps forard, about face, and take a look at 
 yoursilves !" About facing to take a look at ourselves 
 is a good thing once in a while, and we did it; and I 
 hope we took at least one step forward. 
 
 The longer I live and farm the more clearly I see 
 that we American farmers are living under conditions 
 of unregulated and abnormal development. Let me 
 try to tell you what I mean. My brother in Moline, 
 a doctor, once proved to me that the human body 
 doesn't need the vermiform appendix — ^which is the 
 little rinktum that gets diseased when we have appen- 
 dicitis. He claimed in this explanation that the vermi- 
 form appendix is all that is left of some extra stomach 
 which our ancestors had when they were beasts — a 
 stomach for water such as camels possess, or a stor- 
 age stomach for grass, or something like that; I for- 
 get the exact theory. As we developed into human be- 
 ings that stomach shriveled up and became vestigial, 
 and now is good for nothing, but is a fine summer 
 home for germs. 
 
 Doctor Faville told us the other day at our regular 
 schoolhouse meeting that the upper part of the lungs 
 are little used because we are descended from some 
 being like a bird (instead of a cow or a camel!) that 
 used more lung space than we do, and this upper story 
 
JACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 233 
 
 is the attic which has become abandoned in the process 
 of development. He pleased the young women-folks 
 very much by asserting that tight lacing actually cuts 
 down the amount of pulmonary consumption among 
 women, because this method of dressing forces the air 
 into the upper parts of the lungs by shutting up the 
 lower parts. Anyhow, it seems to be a fact that these 
 upper nooks and comers of the lungs are the favorite 
 starting-place of tuberculosis, and maybe the difficulty 
 of filling them with air and the lack of necessity for so 
 doing may have had something to do with this peculi- 
 arity of the disease. It seems to be one of the penalties 
 of evolution that the organs of which the animal is 
 slowly ridding itself are not only not useful for a few 
 million years, but are actually a soiu-ce of danger and 
 evil. 
 
 Now the whole business of farm landlordism and 
 tenantry has grown up in new phases within a genera- 
 tion or so. We all know, of course, that the early 
 patrons and great grantees of the crown tried to start 
 American life off in the American colonies on a basis 
 of feudal tenure ; but it didn't work. The people kicked 
 the feudal landlords out and proceeded to build up a 
 landlordism of their own, which is probably far worse 
 in many respects than the system they fought against. 
 But I am no historian, and I feel that I am getting in 
 over my head; so I had better illustrate my point of 
 maldevelopment in land tenure by otu- own experience 
 right here in the Fairview settlement. 
 
 We have always had more or less tenant farming. 
 
234 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 even when land was so cheap as to be almost free. 
 Before I was married I rented a farm for two or three 
 years. I rented on shares. In those days the land- 
 lord's share was one-quarter of the crop. It was better 
 for me to give a quarter of the crop to Foster Wendell 
 than to buy land for myself; especially as I had insuf- 
 ficient money wherewith to buy. I could have earned 
 almost as much by working out by the month, but I 
 had horses, a wagon and some plows, and by using 
 these I was to that extent a capitalist as well as a 
 laborer, and I received a return for my capital. I had 
 some live stock, too, and could keep them on the rough- 
 age and other unsalable feed, and thus get more and 
 more of a start against the time when I should buy a 
 farm of my own. Tenant farming was a very con- 
 venient intermediate stage between laboring for wages 
 and owning a farm. As for the landlord, he got a 
 small return on the small price he paid for the black 
 prairie soil and something for his labor of breaking it 
 up, building a small house and some sorry buildings 
 and fences. If he asked for more than this the tenant 
 would quit, and either go to work by the month after 
 selhng off his stuff, or would buy a farm, or move on 
 west and become a squatter, or, after a few years, 
 take up a claim under the homestead law. He had no 
 cinch on the tenant, and the rent was no real burden. 
 Soon, of course, rent went up to a third of the crop, 
 and hung there a long time. Then it began to take a 
 lot of money to equip and carry on a farm, and all 
 kinds of lease systems grew up under which the land- 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 235 
 
 lord furnished more of the capital and took more of 
 the returns. 
 
 In the beginning of our leasing system — if it can be 
 called a system — few tenants wanted to bind them- 
 selves for a longer time than one year. Usually the 
 owner either desired to return to the place himself in 
 a year or so, or the tenant had in mind getting a place 
 of his own very soon. There was no question involved 
 of keeping up fertility.. We thought at that time that 
 manure was a bad thing for our land. The fertiUty 
 seemed inexhaustible. Straw was not saved. On the 
 contrary, we bucked it off from the tail of the thresh- 
 ing machine with a pole drawn by a horse, and when 
 the machine moved away, burned it to get rid of it. 
 It became a motto that it was cheaper to move the bam 
 than haul the manure away from it — ^and considering 
 the fact that most of our "bams" were straw stables 
 with a substructure of poles obtained from the timber 
 along the nearest river, moving them when the manure 
 got three to five feet deep was an easy matter. Happy 
 was the farmer who lived on the bank of a stream, 
 so that he could throw the manure, now so precious, 
 down to a point where it would be washed away by 
 freshets. 
 
 Thus our whole system of agriculture was based on 
 the mining of the soil and the neglect of fertility. As 
 years went by most farm owners, but by no means all 
 of them, saw the necessity of soil maintenance and 
 adopted methods of keeping the manure for the land ; 
 but our tenant system was too firmly established to be 
 
236 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 changed in the same direction to any great extent — 
 and our soil is still rather rich. The one-year lease 
 persisted; and why should a. tenant for one year bother 
 to husband straw, haul out the manure, keep live stock, 
 and especially buy and feed rich concentrates on the 
 place, i when in the nature of things it takes several 
 years for the farmer to get the full benefits of these 
 things? If the tenant farmer is a bad soil manager it 
 is a good deal more the fault of the landlord than of 
 the tenant. These things must be understood before 
 one can see the full problem which confronted my wife 
 and me when Ben Phillips defaulted in his rent, and 
 his case was taken up, first by Tom Whelpley, the 
 schoolmaster; and then by Adolph Tulp, the German, 
 and Jeff Sharpe, the Britisher. 
 
 My wife is a good business woman, and, like most 
 women, conservative. That is, she sticks to custom. 
 Her idea of the relation of landlord and tenant was 
 that when the tenant does not pay the rent it is only 
 business to collect the sum if possible; and in any case 
 send him away and lease the land to another better 
 able to carry out the contract of lease. Otherwise, she 
 held, she was merely contributing to the support of an 
 unsuccessful man's family, to whom she was under no 
 obligation, moral or legal. She is not a hard-hearted 
 woman, but she lives up to her ideals both in business 
 and charity ; and she does not mingle the two. And I 
 must say that she and I have agreed pretty well. We 
 agreed when she told Ben Phillips that he vvpuld have 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 237 
 
 to sell something and pay her, or give security for the 
 debt and get off the farm. 
 
 "It isn't right," said he — ^which shows that the new 
 life of the neighborhood had been giving him some 
 advanced ideas — "I'll need all I have on any new place 
 I go to. I have been trying to make the farm richer 
 instead of poorer, because it only seems right — ^and we 
 like the neighborhood and always meant to stay on the 
 place as long as we could. And I don't like to go to 
 another farm crippled in things to do with." 
 
 "Well," said my wife, "I'm sorry, but I've made my 
 plans for that rent money, and I must have it. You 
 could have had the place as long as you paid the rent ; 
 but I surely don't owe you an3rthing for farming it 
 well. You did that for your own interest, not mine." 
 I "I've hauled a thousand loads of manure," said Ben, 
 "in the three years I've worked your farm. The land 
 will bring better crops for years on account of that. 
 The next tenant will get the benefit. Why, I've bought 
 the richness of lots of that manure in oil-cake and cot- 
 tonseed rheal for my cattle. It don't look right for me 
 to lose it" 
 
 "Did you buy the oil-cake or cottonseed meal for the 
 cattle or the land?" I asked. 
 
 "I bought it for the cattle," said Ben. "But all the 
 profits went into the manure. I'd get back what I've 
 lost on feeding, or a part of it, if I could farm that 
 land while the strength of the manure lasts. It may 
 be legal, but it ain't right." 
 
238 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 My wife couldn't see that there was a lick of sense 
 in what he said, and stuck by her guns. I couldn't see 
 what other business course was open to her, but I could 
 see plainly enough that the next tenant would be able 
 to pay his rent more easily, or, for the matter of that, 
 to pay a higher rent on account of what Ben had done. 
 Really, we could sell Ben's fertility to another man, 
 after collecting his rent in full from him. It made me 
 a little uneasy in my conscience — ^but there was the law, 
 and there was the custom. And law and custom, I find, 
 when sifted to the bottom, generally have reason back 
 of them. Sometimes, as in this case, they have the 
 reason of a past age behind^ them rather than the rea- 
 son of to-day. Then they are vermiform appendixes 
 and unused lung tracts in our social evolution. That 
 is what I meant a while ago. 
 
 I suppose it was three or four days after that when 
 Adolph Tulp came along one Sunday, with his best 
 clothes on, to have one of his rather frequent chats 
 with us. Adolph is a great visitor. He knows some- 
 thing of special interest, seemingly, to any man, woman 
 or child in the neighborhood whom he may happen to 
 meet. This time, however, he was excited. He had a 
 letter in his pocket from his brother in Germany — ^this 
 was before the war, remember— and a few press clip- 
 pings, all of which he translated for us. 
 
 " 'Ve are all veil,' " ran Adolph's translation, " 'but 
 ve haf had much trouble, from which ve are now hap- 
 pily outcome. It came from the lease of the farm. 
 Our landlord ' " 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 239 
 
 "He iss the Kaiser," said Adolph, in a tone of deep 
 respect, notwithstanding his radicalism, "but Oscar 
 calls him only 'our landlord.' The Emperor has done 
 wrong in dis!" 
 
 " 'Our landlord,' " the translation went on, " 'in 
 some way became offended, or wished to change the 
 mode of husbandry from our ancient system, and re- 
 fused to renew our lease.' " 
 
 "Dis," said Adolph, "is horrible! Ve haf been on 
 dat farm for almost as long as de Hohenzollems on 
 der trone." ^ 
 
 I thought of Ben Phillips, but it didn't seem quite 
 the same thing. My wife's farm was in America, you 
 know, and the Phillips family hadn't been on it for but 
 three years. Those things appeared to make a differ- 
 ence ; for though we felt indignant at the Emperor for 
 sending the Tulp family from their farm, it never oc- 
 curred to us that it might be as disagreeable to Ben 
 Phillips and his family to be homeless every spring, or 
 even every three years, as for the Tulps in Germany 
 to have to move once in three to five centuries or so. 
 Adolph went on with his letter. 
 
 '"To leave the old farm — ^that, my brother, were 
 worse than death. It is in our hearts, the old farm. It 
 is in our blood, and in our bones. So ve felt; but ve 
 must leave it.' " 
 
 My wife looked at me as if to say that the PhiUipses 
 couldn't be as fond as that of her farm at any rate. 
 
 " 'But,' " continued the letter, " 'if we could have 
 gone in honor it would have been one thing. It seemed 
 
240 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 to be our lot to go in dishonor. That would be another 
 and worse thing. The Emperor not only refused to 
 renew our lease, but it was published as his words that 
 we were to be sent away because we were incompetent 
 farmers !' " 
 
 "Mein Gott!" exclaimed Adolph. "The Tulps !" 
 
 " 'This,' " he read on, " 'we could not endure. So, 
 with much sorrow, but also with much indignation, 
 we sued the Emperor for damages for disturbance of 
 our possession under the lease, and also for libel.' " 
 
 Adolph looked at us with a strange mingling of pride 
 and horror. 
 
 "The Kaiser !" he hissed. "Damages and also libel. 
 The Tulps!" 
 
 "Why," said my wife, "they certainly had their 
 nerve! I should think an Emperor would have the 
 right to take possession of his own farm when the 
 lease expires, to say nothing of common folks. And 
 if I want to say that Ben Phillips is a poor farmer I'll 
 doit!" . 
 
 "But he issn't!" said Adolph. "Ben Phillips would 
 not in Chermany leave, even though you wass the Kai- 
 serin. Listen!" 
 
 " 'It has been a great crisis in our lives,' " the trans- 
 lation proceeded, " 'and we have been grieved at the 
 things published about our suit/kgainst the Emperor. 
 But before the case came to trial the Emperor's agents 
 came to us and offered us marks' " — ^here Adolph 
 stopped to turn marks into dollars — " 'thirty thousand 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 241 
 
 dollars as damages justly due us for disturbance of our 
 possession ^ " 
 
 "And you say the lease was up?" inquired my wife. 
 
 "Yess," said Adolph, folding up his letter, "and the 
 Kaiser also published a statement — ^my brother vould 
 not take the thirty thousand dollars otherwise — ^that 
 the Tulps are good farmers." 
 
 "I glory in their spunk," said I. "They certainly 
 put the screws to His Nibs, didn't they?" 
 
 "But it's the king, isn't it?" queried my wife. 
 
 "Yess," said Adolph, "but the rights of the man 
 who works the farm are also, even in Kaiser-ridden 
 Chermany, somedings." 
 
 And he pocketed his letter and went away. 
 
 "Well," said my wife, "they needn't talk to me any 
 more about the enslaved peasantry of Europe, if this 
 is a sample of their ways over there. Better get up 
 a movonent for the liberation of the enslaved land- 
 owners !" 
 
 She said this to Tom Whelpley when he and Maude 
 Adcerman stopped in the road, in Tom's little car, and 
 talked to us as we stood by the big Cottonwood in front 
 of the house. The Sharpes had been to call on us and 
 were just going away, and we made quite a little group. 
 We were talking of Adolph's new scenery for the Lit- 
 tle Country Theater; and speaking of Adolph in those 
 days always led to a discussion of the victory his 
 brother had won over the Kaiser. By this time all the 
 newspapers had printed articles about it. You all re- 
 
242 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 member it, no doubt; it was quite a world sensation 
 for a while, this contest between a farmer and the 
 Emperor over the question of a, tenant's rights in 
 Germany. 
 
 "I wonder," said Tom, "which is better for the land- 
 lords, to have people- on their lands from generation 
 to generation, farming so well that they will sue even 
 the Emperor if he says they' are not good farmers, or 
 to have leases like ours, which, as Henry Wallace says, 
 are criminal conspiracies between landlord and tenant 
 to rob the land?" 
 
 "I for one," said my wife, "would be glad to renew 
 my lease every year as long as I could keep that sort 
 of tenant." 
 
 She knew he was thinking of Ben Phillips, and that 
 Maude Ackerraan was sorry at the prospect of losing 
 Mrs. Phillips and Lizzie, their daughter, from the 
 district. 
 
 "Our leases," said Jeff Sharpe, "would create riot 
 and insurrection among the yeomanry of England. 
 Uncle Henry Wallace told us at the Farmers' Week 
 Meetings last winter of an experience he had at the 
 home of a farmer on a two-hundred-and-fifty-acre 
 farm in England on one of his visits to the old country. 
 This man paid a high rent for the land, but lived in 
 fine style, kept carriages and servants, and dined off 
 china and plate. Mr. Wallace asked him when his 
 lease expired. Tt falls in next year,' said the farmer. 
 'Suppose,' said Uncle Henry, 'that the Duke refuses 
 to renew it? He could do that, I suppose?' 'Yes,' said 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 243 
 
 the farmer, 'he could; but I'm not afraid of anything 
 of the kind as long as I carry on the farm according 
 to the lease and the laws.' 'You have been making this 
 land richer and richer,' said Uncle Henry, 'and this 
 enrichment has cost you money. What would you do 
 if the Duke should say he wanted the land for another 
 tenant?' 'I should sue him,' replied the farmer, 'for 
 fifteen thousand pounds for disturbance ; and I should 
 collect the money. I should make him pay me every 
 penny, according to well-established Ifules, for the im- 
 exhausted fertility which there is in the land on ac- 
 count of my operations. It would cost him dearly. 
 This is a free country, sir, and a tenant can not be 
 robbed by his landlord with imptmity. We farmers 
 are not allowed to scourge the fertility out of the land, 
 and should not be; but the laws and customs of the 
 coimtry protect us in our interest in what we have done 
 for the land. Oh, I'm safe enough, sir, as long as I 
 farm well. This is England, you know !' " 
 
 "That sounds," said I, "a good deal like Adolph's 
 brother's story. Landlords, Lucy, seem to be an op- 
 pressed class in England as well as in Germany." 
 
 Jeff drove off with his family, and we invited Tom 
 and Maude in for supper. They alighted rather eagerly, 
 I thought, as if they had been waiting for the invita- 
 tion. After supper Tom pulled from his pocket some 
 papers, and turning to my wife, said, "Mrs. Dunham, 
 I have had the school class in farm economics make a 
 detailed report on your farm leased to Ben Phillips. 
 Would you like to go over the figures?" 
 
244 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 By that time she was a little sensitive on the Phil- 
 lips matter, but she said she'd be glad to look over the 
 statement. She'd like to find the hole in the skimmer 
 that lost the profits from as good a farm as that. Tom 
 went over the matter item by item. He showed that 
 Ben had bought feeders iat about the figure at which 
 I bought mine. They were high, and it turned out that 
 they might have been bought at other times a little 
 lower, but he had bought with average wisdom. His 
 steers were good feeders, too ; a little heavier for their 
 ages than mine, and I am considered a good buyer. 
 Ben had fed a good ration, too, and his cattle had made 
 good gains — only a little costlier than the gains on 
 mine; but I had better bams and equipment than my 
 wife had furnished to Ben. 
 
 "If the warmth and comfort aren't in the barns, you 
 know," said Tom, "you have to feed warmth and com- 
 fCrt to them in the form of com." 
 
 "I suppose so," assented my wife. "And I s'pose I 
 should put in a thousand dollars or so on top of the 
 rent to make it easier for Ben to make good!" 
 
 Well, the upshot of the examination was that they 
 had to give Ben Phillips the credit of having carried 
 on the farm pretty well. Not the best in the way of 
 efficiency, but better than the average. We had to ad- 
 mit that if after paying wages arid all the overhead of 
 my own farm that year I had had to pay rent at the 
 same rent charged to Ben Phillips it would have made 
 me scratch to do it. 
 
 "And now," said Tom, "we come to the benefits to 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 245 
 
 the farm of the methods followed by Ben. Suppose," 
 Tom argued, "that we had had the sort of lease that 
 Jeff has told us of; or the sort that Adolph's folks had 
 in Germany; how should we stand with Ben? We 
 should owe him for the unexhausted fertility, which 
 morally belongs to him, enough to pay the year's rent 
 and more." 
 
 The kids in school had it all figured out in terms of 
 potash, nitrogen and phosphoric acid, and also in terms 
 of barnyard manure at so much a load. 
 
 "Well, dam it !" said my wife, getting nettled, "the 
 tenants in Germany and England have to pay their 
 rent, don't they?" 
 
 "Not always," said Tom; and he went on and told 
 how landlords had always done in unfavorable years 
 in the most enlightened of the old countries, and what 
 the law now required of them. "You see," said he, 
 "all these countries have been studying these matters 
 for centuries, and they have found out that there are 
 four parties to every lease — ^the landlord, the tenant, 
 the public, and the land itself. These laws against 
 rack-renting and disturbance of families in their 
 homes " 
 
 "Their homes!" said my wife sarcastically; "I al- 
 ways kind of thought that hundred and twenty was 
 mine !" 
 
 "Unless it's Ben Phillips's home, he is homeless," 
 said Tom. "We used to send money to the Irish Land 
 League because of the evictions. Evictions in Ireland 
 are a thing of the past; but the evicted Irish farmer 
 
246 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 was in exactly the condition that Ben Phillips will be 
 in if he has to go to a new place next spring." 
 
 "But," said my wife, "the Irish landlords took away 
 the improvements the tenants had made." 
 
 "How about the thousand loads of manure Ben has 
 hauled out ?" asked Tom. "Isn't that an improvement 
 Ben has made? And won't you take it from him if 
 he goes ?" 
 
 Neither Lucy nor I had a word to say. And yet it 
 seemed absurd that we had to begin to plan and study 
 and take into account anything besides our rent. If it ' 
 has come about that a landlord has to look upon him- 
 self as a, public servant, and subject to all sorts of 
 claims on the part of the land and the tenant and the 
 public, it is a pretty pass indeed for America ! 
 
 "Over half the families in this district under the 
 year-by-year system of leasing farms," Tom went on, 
 "are homeless every spring. How can we make this a 
 good place in which to live and bring up children if that 
 keeps up? How can we make a good school of the 
 Fairview Consolidated School if more than half of 
 our children come from families that have about as 
 much stability of residence as the guests in a ten-cent 
 lodging house? How can Frank Wiggins make this 
 the ideal community from a religious view-point when 
 half the people in it can drive the other half out of it 
 if they desire to do so, and will if a bad season makes 
 it impossible for the tenant half to pay the rent? It's 
 worse yet in some places. Only one farmer out of 
 four in Texas entirely owns his own farm. There are 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 247 
 
 314,263 fanners in Texas who are homeless every year 
 so far as the laws are concerned. You say that they 
 are ignorant negroes ? Well, how are the negroes ever 
 to be anything but poor and ignorant as long as they 
 have no permanent homes ? But only 55,000 of these 
 are negro families; so that there are 259,000 white 
 families in this one state in this condition of economic 
 homelessness. And this is getting worse all the time. 
 You know how fast the farms are going into the hands 
 of renters in this district. I can see how the movement 
 has increased in my short residence here; and in Texas, 
 which is no worse than other states in which I have 
 lived and worked, while the number of farms has in- 
 creased eighty-three per cent, in the last twenty years, 
 the number of farms owned by the men who work 
 them has increased only fifty per cent., while the ten- 
 ant fanners have increased one hundred and thirty per 
 cent. It is coming in America, the age of landlordism 
 — it is here. It is here in Fairview. Shall we make 
 it an age of mining the soil and undermining manhood 
 and womanhood, or shall we try to get rid of it in the 
 future; and in the meantime shall we humanize and 
 enlighten it? It is up to you. Aunt Lucy, to decide 
 your part of this great national question right now, 
 and in deciding it to help the movement for better 
 thmgs." 
 
 "Better things for who?" said my wife; who knows 
 more about who and whom than she lets on. 
 
 "For the country," said Tom. "For the neighbor- 
 hood. For the school. For the church. For humanity. 
 
248 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 For God. For the land. For the tenants. For the land- 
 lords themselves." 
 
 This was quite an outburst for Tom, who as a rule 
 doesn't resemble the earthquake, or the whirlwind, but 
 contents himself with being the still small voice. We 
 were impressed. Maude Ackerman looked at Tom with 
 tears in her eyes. Lucy sat mute ; and I pulled out my 
 jack-knife and looked for something to whittle. Not 
 finding anything, I shut it up and put it in my pocket. 
 To lower the discussion to a plane on which we would 
 all feel more at ease, though we were sure to feel the 
 force of Tom's appeal, I suggested that if he would 
 address his remarks to the landlord's side of it we 
 could follow him better. 
 
 "No, you can't," said he; "any two people who have 
 done as much splendid and unselfish work for the com- 
 mon good as you two have to your credit can't help 
 following me, and you know it; but I reckon we had 
 better take up the landlord's side. Corn-Belt land is 
 not as rich as it used to be, is it, tJncle Abner?" 
 
 "Not near," said I, "except where good fanning has 
 kept it up." 
 
 "Do you know a farm worked by tenants which is 
 hot getting poorer and poorer all the time?" 
 
 "No," said I^ 
 
 "It's the shiftless tenants," said my wife. 
 
 "It's the shifting tenants," said Tom; "the tenants 
 that lose when they haul out manure, or feed cotton- 
 seed meal or oil-cake or tankage or anything else 
 bought and fed on the place." 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 249 
 
 "Well, gosh !" said my wife, who uses these words 
 only when she is sore at herself, "what can I do? I 
 can't give the farm to Ben Phillips for the sake of your 
 old school and Frank's church and the land and the 
 future. What has the future done for me?" 
 
 "This Com Belt," said Tom, "is God's garden. 
 Other gardens have become deserts because people 
 asked what posterity had done for them. 
 
 " 'They say the Lion and the Lizard keep 
 
 The Courts where Jamshyd gloried, and drank deep. 
 
 And Bahram, that great Hunter — ^the Wild Ass 
 Stamps o'er his Head, but can not break his Sleep.' 
 
 "Our system of tenantry, carried on to its ultimate 
 results, will make Iowa a desert, and reduce Chicago to 
 a wilderness of ruins with a few fishermen holing up 
 in huts quarried from the stones of the Postoffice 
 Building. Do you care?" 
 
 "Nonsense !" said Lucy ; "but of course I care. I'm 
 just as good an American as you are. And now, see- 
 ing that you're so smart, what kind of a lease do you 
 recommend for Ben Phillips ; and what about my rent ? 
 Shall I give it to posterity ?" 
 
 "I think you should take your share of the losses, 
 when losses come," said Tom. "But I think you should 
 study the kind of farming that pays best in this com- 
 mimity, as shown by our records and the studies of the 
 state college and the Department at Washington, and 
 your own experience, and spend a little time, and if 
 
250 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 necessary a little nioney getting your farm into the 
 profitable class. Then I think you should give Ben a 
 five-year lease." 
 
 "I can't do that," said my wife; "my boy is think- 
 ing of coming back and taking that farm, and I must 
 keep it free for him." 
 
 "Don't make Ben Phillips pay for it, then. If you 
 must let it from year to year, make a lease with Ben 
 which will give him a claim on you for the unexhausted 
 fertility created during his tenancy. And fix it up with 
 him somehow so that he can pay this year's rent on 
 easy terms." 
 
 We couldn't find any basis of agreement that day, 
 though we sought earnestly for it. None of us consid- 
 ered then that Ben Phillips and his wife ought to be 
 taken into our councils ; but when we finally did so we 
 discovered that they were as desirous as we of protect- 
 ing my wife's interests. In fact, when they found that 
 we were taking the matter up on broad grounds of the 
 common welfare, their sympathy with that way of 
 approach and their sedulous efforts to resolve every 
 doubt against the tenant and in favor of the landlord 
 were a little touching. As a matter of fact, they hated 
 anything that smacked of charity to them or carried 
 with it any implication that the tenant farmer needs 
 special consideration as a ward of society. Pretty soon 
 we were amused by the spectacle of my wife urging 
 things on them on public grounds and the upkeep of 
 fertility, rather than as favors to them. They were 
 self-respecting people, you know, like most farmers. 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 251 
 
 whether they own their land or not. Finally, Daisy 
 Wiggins showed us the way out 
 
 "What a splendid subject for study in our meetings 
 this winter !" she exclaimed. 
 
 "But we want to know what we are going to do 
 next summer," said Mrs. Phillips. "Ben can get a job 
 on the street cars in the city, we think, and we want 
 to make a sale " 
 
 "Never you mind about the street-car job," said 
 Lucy. "We can fix it right up now, if you want to; 
 but I think it will be better to wait until we, get through 
 with Daisy's programme. I'll let Ben use that tmex- 
 hausted fertility to pay me out, anyhow; and maybe 
 we'll find a better scheme than we can think of now." 
 
 So we debated it. Maybe you think we didn't have 
 some warm arguments over that matter. Tenants and 
 landlords, people from town and economists from the 
 agricultural college; with all and sundry we argued 
 it for weeks at the schoolhouse meetings; and Frank 
 Wiggins preached a sermon on the Mosaic land system 
 and the Year of Jubilee. We discussed Economic Rent, 
 Speculative Rent, and the Relations between Rent, 
 Wages and Interest. We had a SingleTax lecture, and 
 a lot of Single Tax speeches. Once the Socialists came 
 out from town and took possession of the meeting, and 
 we had Economic Determinism, the Materialistic In- 
 terpretation of History, and the Class Struggle — ^the 
 two former by a drayman, and the latter by a rich 
 man's son, who was himself an illustration, I thought, 
 tojE Jhe theory of Q.ass ynconsciousness as opposed to 
 
252 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 the one preached by him. We lost all sight of Ben 
 Phillips and my wife's rent. We dug down into the 
 vitals of society. 
 
 "Dat iss natural," said Adolph Tulp. "Vunce the 
 god Thor vass out fishing, and caught somedings on 
 his hook dat made earthquakes and volcanoes ven he 
 tried to pull it out. He had hooked the Midgard Snake 
 vich iss wrapped round and round the whole earth, and 
 vich, ven id iss landed, lands the planet with it. Ven 
 ve take hold of the land kvestion ve haf hooked the 
 Midgard Snake. No vunder it makes a disturbance. 
 It iss the kvestion of alllcvestions. Ven it iss settled, 
 all iss settled." 
 
 Of course, most of us knew better than to work with 
 the theorists. We gave them good things to eat, cooked 
 by the girls of the domestic economy classes as a part 
 of their class work, and charged for them at our regu-" 
 lar rates — which may be estimated by the fact that 
 three cents bought a good piece of pie or a sandwich 
 at our evening meetings. Thus we kept even on ex- 
 penses and sent everybody away satisfied after blow- 
 ing off their radical steam. We sensible people studied 
 leases. Jeff Sharpe read a paper on British Leasing 
 Systems, and Adolph Tulp explained the German sys- 
 tem he knew, and told us all the story of his brother's 
 controversy with the Kaiser, after having told each of 
 us separately. We studied the Christie & Lowe leases 
 at Beardstown, and the Scully leases. We were aston- 
 ished to discover that the Scully lands, owned by an 
 Irish or British landlord, and many thousand acres in 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 253 
 
 area, are leased on terms so much more favorable 
 to the tenant than those imposed by our home-grown 
 American landlords that a man who owns a long-term 
 lease of a Scully farm can sell it for several thousand 
 dollars. My wife was a little ashamed to find that a 
 non-resident foreign landlord makes leases which are 
 . assets to his tenants, while she had made one with Ben 
 PhiUips which was a liability for Ben. We studied the 
 Wadsworth farm system in the Genessee Valley, and 
 the BooEwalter system in Nebraska. Some of them 
 seemed very bad to us, and some pretty good, but none 
 seemed exactly right 
 
 We finally made up our minds that the first and most 
 important step was simply to give Ben a lease which 
 would allow him payment for the unexhausted fer- 
 tility put into the land by him. Tom Whelpley gave up 
 in despair the plan of getting the American landlord 
 to grant long-term leases, though my wife made one 
 finally with Ben for five years. The provision for pay- 
 ment for the unexhausted fertility on refusal to renew 
 the lease called for settlement on the basis of so much 
 of the bam3rard manure remaining at the end of the 
 first year, so much the second, so much for the third, 
 and nothing after that — ^though it helps for a longer 
 time. We don't use commercial fertilizers much, so 
 nothing was said about them. Allowance was made 
 according to tables we prepared from data furnished 
 us by the colleges, for the enrichment of the manure by 
 the feeding of concentrates, and the use of ground 
 phosphate rock in the stables or otherwise ; and as some 
 
254 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 of our land is getting acid, a clause was inserted giving 
 pay for lime where used by mutual consent, for five 
 years after its application in a diminishing amount. 
 
 "This," said Tom, "is more important than we think. 
 It will give every tenant a hold on his home. If by 
 enrichment of the land he can make it costly for his 
 landlord to send him away, it will result in longer 
 leases, no matter how the lease reads. It is the begin-> 
 ning of a different and better system for the tenant, 
 for the community, for the land, and in the long run, 
 for the landlord. Anyhow, the landlord did not make 
 the land as he made the improvements. All systems of 
 religion recognize, as did the religion of Moses, that 
 the land is not like other objects, a thing which can 
 properly be held in unlimited ownership. 'The land 
 shall not be sold forever,' said our religion in its earli- 
 est days, 'for the land is mine, saith the Lord.' The 
 landlord's interests must be first those of the commu^ 
 hity, and second those of a taker of rent. 
 
 "Now, how will this little thing, the giving to the 
 tenant the ownership in the goodness of the land which 
 he has made, affect things? How would it affect the 
 tenure of the land as between Mrs. Dunham and Mr. 
 Phillips? At the end of five years this lease will termi- 
 nate. If Mrs. Dunham desires, she can send Mr. Phil- 
 lips away; but in the meantime he can confidently pro- 
 ceed to build up the land in fertility. If she sends him 
 away she must pay him for the fertility he has left 
 on hand in the soil. It will be to his interest to put in 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 255 
 
 as much as possible ; for if he stays it will make him 
 prosperous as a farmer, and if he goes it will be as 
 good as money in the bank. This will make for better 
 fanning. It will also force the landlord to invest actual 
 money in a new tenant in exchange for the old, whom 
 she can keep for nothing. The better the tenant the 
 more it will cost to get rid of him. Soon, if this system 
 is adopted, the tenant farmer in America will hold 
 from decade to decade, and from generation to gen- 
 eration, as in the old world. This is the first step tow- 
 ard that same stable land tenancy which surprised us 
 when we learned of it through the experience of the 
 Tulp family in Germany, and the things Uncle Henry 
 Wallace saw in England. It is a start toward what all 
 enlightened peoples have found necessary as a means 
 of keeping landlordism from ruining the nation. It is 
 the next best thing to the abolition of landlordism it- 
 self." 
 
 Actually, and all reform hot air aside, this thing is 
 important. Ben Phillips is a better tenant than ever, 
 and other landowners are beginning to copy the lease. 
 And I don't for a moment suppose that this timid step 
 toward a better land system will be the last. The Fair- 
 view Idea, however, is that rural life can't stand still. 
 That way lies anjrthing but good American progress. 
 I am, of course, a stand-patter — called that, anyhow — 
 but if Moses found it necessary to give back the land 
 every fifty years to the families that originally owned 
 it, I don't think a man can be called a wild-eyed fanatic 
 
256 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 if he looks our land system over and sees what can b^ 
 done to prevent all the land from going into the hands 
 of those who never work land, and all the work of 
 farming to those who never own land. Furthermore, 
 I don't like laboring to build up a socialized community 
 in Fairview and have it all shot to rags every spring 
 by the moving in and moving out of tenant farmers. 
 I want them to stay until we can build them solidly 
 into the neighborhood like good concrete. Ben Phil- 
 lips's folks, now — ^they are almost as firmly fixed in 
 their community niche as if they owned that hundred 
 and twenty outright. That's the way we like to see it. 
 After all it is only common sense and enlightened 
 patriotism on our part. Peonism and peasantry don't 
 
 pay. 
 
 That's the way we are beginning to look at the 
 tenantry matter in Fairview; but we are only a little 
 community. What we do is of small consequence, 
 even to us, in this struggle with the Midgard Snake, 
 whose folds encircle the world. Some one has said 
 that small causes in the field of political economy not 
 only can not produce large effects, but produce no ef- 
 fects at all. An idea, however, is never a small thing 
 if it be germinal. We in Fairview are doing our lit- 
 tle, even though what we do be mistakenly done, in the 
 faith that the idea of making an attack on the great 
 question of land tenure is likely to be a germinal one, 
 and therefore not a small thing. 
 
 It is a question for you, oh, ye millions of town- 
 dwellers who own so many of the farms of America, 
 
TACKLING THE MIDGARD SNAKE 257 
 
 to say what you will do to save the land in its rich- 
 ness, to save the nation in its integrity, to save our 
 returning soldiers, to save the nation from you your- 
 selves ! 
 The Midgard Snake is on your hook ! 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 
 
 I HAVE come to the end of these sketches of the 
 history of recent changes in rural life in Fair- 
 view. I can't finish, however, without telling some- 
 thing of our experience with Uncle Sam's farming 
 missionary, the county agent. I suppose I have de- 
 layed in speaking of this, because I have been depicting 
 the Fairview Idea ; and we can't claim the county agent 
 as a part of that. In fact, we are not very proud of our 
 original attitude toward the county agent. You may 
 remember that the Reverend Frank Wiggins tried hard 
 to have us hire one early in the movement, and had 
 Tom Whelpley offered as his candidate for the job. I 
 was responsible, in the main, for having Tom rejected 
 by the farmers — and then Frank turned on me and got 
 Tom elected to the position of Principal of the Fair- 
 view Consolidated Rural School, in which position he 
 has heaped coals of fire on our heads by making that 
 school the best in the state, we think, and winning re- 
 nown all over the nation as the master of a prize rural 
 school, in which teaching is, from the first day to the 
 last, and in all branches, knit into the life of the com- 
 munity. 
 
 Altogether it was a fine thing for us that we re- 
 
 258 
 
UNCLE SAM IN F'AIRVIEW 259 
 
 jected the county-agent stone, that it might become the 
 head of the comer in our educational edifice; and I 
 wish to predict here and now that at some time not 
 far in the future all really progressive communities 
 will have the A B C of fanning to which the county 
 agents now so largely devote themselves, taught in the 
 rural schools. So, as a matter of fact, we accidentally 
 took a leap into the better by-and-by when we put that 
 work into the Fairview Consolidated Rural School — 
 where it belongs. 
 
 But, though the county agent is not a part of the 
 Fairview Idea, it is a part of that idea to make the 
 best possible use of good things — ^like the Little Coun- 
 try Theater of North Dakota, and the rural drama of 
 that state and Minnesota — ^no matter whether they 
 originate with us or not. And the county-agent move- 
 ment in the United States is too big and revolutionary 
 a fimction of the national government to be ignored by 
 any community which is trying to march forward, and 
 is even half-way open-minded. 
 
 I wonder how many readers of this story know 
 how big, how vital, and how potent a thing for growth 
 the county-agent movement is ? I wonder if there are 
 not a lot of them who are very hazy in their minds as 
 to what it is, even in a general way? How many 
 know that the United States Government, through the 
 Department of Agriculture, sends missionaries of 
 skilled farming, salesmen of agricultural prosperity 
 into any county in the United States which fulfils the 
 conditions, pays a part of his salary, if the state and 
 
260 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 county will pay the rest, hires state managers to keep 
 these men in the field and see that they do good work, 
 and that after these men are on the ground they be- 
 come active organizers of better agriculture, working 
 with and for the farmers, instead of on them, and be- 
 coming in fact County Superintendents of Agricultural 
 Edtication under United States Government and State 
 Agricultural College Management? Many know these 
 things, but few save farmers who have actually worked 
 with these farm experts know them as one of the great 
 and growing things in our new rural life. Few know 
 that out of the twenty-five hundred or three thousand 
 counties in the United States, nearly half, including 
 all those which are not farming counties, already had 
 these salesmen of good farming prior to that great 
 quickening which came with the great war. Yet such 
 is the fact ; and now; there is a county agent in almost 
 every rural county. 
 
 As I have said, we felt that we knew more about 
 farming in this county than any pin-feathered kid from 
 an agricultural college could know. You see we mis- 
 understood these kids, and also the attitude of the 
 county agent toward the farmers. We thought he was 
 coming out to do things for or to us. Really, the 
 agents do things with us and become community hired 
 men who perform a lot of work that we all have 
 long known to be good and even necessary, but which 
 men can not do alone. Take Freeman Clay's chinch- 
 bug campaign, for instance. But I must tell you about 
 that. 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 261 
 
 It grew out of our ignorance or lack of practise in 
 growing wheat. Not that we oldsters weren't veterans 
 in wheat growing. We all went broke on wheat in the 
 sixties and seventies, when these prairies fed the world 
 with bread. Then we grew spring wheat exclusively. 
 We used to break the prairie sod in April and May of 
 one year, and sow it to wheat the next spring. We 
 knew of no crop which would grow on the freshly- 
 broken sod; and we thought the furrow-slice, a long 
 ribbon of black earth, had to lie and rot for one season 
 before it would make a crop of anything. To be sure, 
 we used to plant corn in holes chopped through the sod 
 with an ax, but sod-corn was the synonym for nothing 
 much. Also, we raised our winter's potatoes, turnips, 
 pumpkins and squashes on the new sod, and scant 
 crops of buckwheat for our winter's cakes ; but nothing 
 of much value in money. What we grew helped us to 
 exist, and that is about all. 
 
 After the earliest flight of pioneers had roughed it 
 through, the later comers found that they could grow 
 a crop of flax right after the breaking-plow, and made 
 good money on it ; and further west many a man paid 
 for his land with the first crop of flax. Then, in West- 
 em Canada, the landowners became wise to this pos- 
 sibility, and sold the land on the basis of a crop the 
 first year, so that the new knowledge was capitalized in 
 the price of land — ^just as all knowledge, new or old, 
 inevitably becomes so capitalized sooner or later. It's 
 the law of land values. 
 
 After the first crop of wheat, which was the second 
 
262 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 year of plowing, we sowed another crop of wheat, and 
 then another, and another, and so on. The Corn-Belt 
 prairies were golden seas, rippling in the sunshine and 
 the winds — a. magnificent sight, as different from the 
 Corn-Belt summer landscape of to-day as Alaska is 
 different from Florida. It was black soil in fall and 
 spring — ^bare black soil as far as the eye could reach. 
 It was the faint green of sprouting grain in April, 
 deepening into lush greenery in May and June, now be- 
 ginning to wave in dark ripples in the wind. It was 
 green and gold in July. And in August the great self- 
 rake reapers, and the old Buckeye droppers, the Marsh 
 Harvesters, each with two men binding and riding at 
 the same time, and the headers spouting geysers of 
 wheat heads into great board boxes. And then the 
 prairie became speckled with shocks, which soon gath- 
 ered into groups of hive-shaped stacks, after which the 
 threshers went about filling the air, from daylight till 
 after dark, with the hum of the cylinders, rising and 
 falling like the voice of no other machine, in a long, 
 wavering, musical paean of triumphant plenty: and 
 then came the days of burning straw-piles, and the 
 stubble-fields again scored with broadening black rib- 
 bons of plowed land, broadening until all was black 
 again, and the wagons wore deep grooves in the eartH 
 as the crop went to the railway, sometimes as much as 
 forty miles off. And then in the spring there :went 
 into these fields another crop of wheat. 
 
 Not for too long a time, however, would nature ial- 
 low this to go on. There came a time when something 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 263 
 
 mysterious was seen to be the matter with the ^heat. 
 It came up as rank as ever, it grew as tall as ever, its 
 heads were as long as ever, but the straw which used 
 to turn to gold from green now bore black specks, and 
 turned brash so that the heads would pull off the bands 
 when we cinched up the sheaf before tucking it in. 
 Sometimes, too, our boots would be red with rust from 
 the wheat straw, and at others the wheat would stand 
 shoulder-high and filled with kernels when some ter- 
 rible thing would shrivel the grain almost to chaff. 
 
 We waded through deep waters in those days. No- 
 body knew what the trouble was, though we had all 
 sorts of theories. Now, the professors in the colleges 
 of the spring-wheat states have found out that when 
 wheat is sown after wheat, as we sowed it, there are 
 fungi and bacteria and blights which fill the soil and 
 pervade the country. But though we suffered from 
 them we did not know they existed. Nobody knew 
 then. Such knowledge belongs to the age of the col- 
 lege of agriculture and the county agent. 
 
 We quit growing wheat, finally, and com became 
 our great crop. Then our states became the Corn-Belt 
 states. Now one may see as much corn as then we saw 
 of wheat. It is as beautiful as the wheat, but it is dif- 
 ferent. Not warned by nature's protest against a one- 
 crop system, we planted corn after com. And recently 
 we have begun to see that this, too, is a mistaken pol- 
 icy. Then wheat came back ; but this time it was not 
 spring wheat. In my young manhood here in the 
 Corn Belt we had no winter wheat which would resist 
 
264 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 the severities of our winters. But twenty-five years or 
 so ago, Russian immigrants brought to Kansas varie- 
 ties of winter wheat which are more hardy; and these 
 have gradually made their way north until they are 
 now grown in Alberta, where the season is so short 
 that this year's harvest must be taken off after next 
 year's seed is sown — thus making wheat after wheat 
 impossible. This wheat has been perfected by the 
 plant-breeders of the colleges, until it is better than 
 when the Russian immigrants brought it over. It 
 brought wheat back to Fairview. We began slowly to 
 adopt the Ohio Valley rotation of corn, then wheat, 
 then clover. Some such change seemed necessary. 
 
 Now this new system found us all out of practise in 
 wheat growing. We had never been much troubled 
 with chinch-bugs, and not at all to speak of with the 
 Hessian fly; but now both these pests were upon us. 
 About the time that I, at least, had come to the con- 
 clusion that I had forgotten a lot about wheat, and 
 that there was another lot I had never known, a county 
 agent was hired for our county. We in the Fairview 
 neighborhood took very little interest in him and his 
 work. We thought we had in Tom Whelpley and the 
 school, and in Frank Wiggins and Daisy his wife, and 
 the Fairview Meeting House, a good deal more than 
 the county agent could give us in the way of aids to 
 rural progress. We were, perhaps, a little uppish and 
 conceited in the matter. 
 
 But the county agent didn't feel that way about us. 
 In fact, he disarmed us by coming to our meetings 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 265 
 
 every Sunday and levying on Tom and Frank for help 
 in his work. He said that it was not often that a 
 county agent came to a county in which his work was 
 so well started in an influential neighborhood. If he 
 could just get the Fairview spirit, and the Fairview 
 Idea, he said, spread all over the county, he would con- 
 sider his work there a success. 
 
 Now, what can you do against that sort of approach ? 
 Nothing but to turn in and help. And after a while 
 we discovered that not even a Tom Whelpley knows 
 ever)rthing, and that the keen young fellow who is 
 making a business of gobbling up every bit of new 
 knowledge as soon as it is knowledge, is sure to be a 
 few laps ahead of the best of us, except in the general 
 and old-established practises of farming, in which, of 
 course, we old stagers naturally know more than any- 
 body else. 
 
 The county agent's name was Freeman Clay. He 
 wasn't so very youthful, after all, though we called 
 him disparagingly a kid. He had an office in the court- 
 house at the coimty seat, and kept a little road-louse of 
 a car, in which he burned up the highways of the county 
 all simuner long. On Saturdays he was in his office, 
 and the farmers and their wives and children, too, got 
 in the habit of dropping in to see him pretty often. 
 I understand this is the way most of these fellows do. 
 Going from farm to farm, as he did, he kept posted on 
 matters of interest, and the first favor he did me was 
 to tell me where I could get three brood sows of the 
 breed I like best, and which I wanted. He sold fifty 
 
266 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 dollars' worth of seed corn for Wilson Beebe, because 
 Wilson's boy had beea taught in school how to select it, 
 save it, and test it ; and it Wcis a good variety of corn. 
 He organized boys' and girls' clubs all over the county, 
 and used to come in his little car and take Tom Whelp- 
 ley ten or fifteen miles about every week, to tell some 
 backward neighborhood how much good we had got 
 out of some community function in Fairview. He was 
 always organizing parties of visitors to attend our 
 Fairview meetings, and localities which still had only 
 the old-fashioned one-room schoolhouses began to 
 simmer with the Fairview ferment. He always car- 
 ried a book with him in which he set down notes of 
 anything any farmer wanted to buy or had to sell. 
 He was a sort of universal sales agent and commission 
 man, with the commission eliminated. It wasn't long 
 before every farmer in the county would stop at the 
 turnrow by the road and wait if he saw the dust of 
 Clay's gasoline bug approaching. 
 
 I did that one day, and complained when Clay ar- 
 rived that the chinch-bugs, after ruining my wheat had 
 attacked the outer rows of com. 
 
 "Too bad," said he. "I'm from a chinch-bug coun- 
 try myself, and l^ave had considerable experience with 
 them." 
 
 "Where?" 1 asked. 
 
 "Kansas," said he. 
 
 "Do any farming down there ?" I asked. 
 
 "Born and raised at it," he answered, "and have an 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW. 267 
 
 interest in a wheat farm there now. That's how I 
 learned about tackling the chinch-bug evil," 
 
 Now, I am firmly convinced that he learned about 
 the control of chinch-bugs in college; but if he had 
 said so, and called it the control of chinch-bugs instead 
 of tackling them, he knew I should have refused to 
 accept any advice from him. He led me to believe that 
 he had picked up his knowledge in farming, just the 
 way I have picked up mine, so I would talk with him 
 as farmer to farmer, instead of as common man to ex- 
 pert. We farmers are such fools sometimes ; almost as 
 big fools as the American banker or the American 
 manufacturer. 
 
 In a business in which only the expert can possibly 
 earn anything above the wages of unskilled labor in 
 other fields, and in which many of us are so inexpert 
 that we actually earn less than do our hired men, there 
 are thousands of farmers who sneer at experts. I have 
 done so myself. I shall no doubt do so at times in the 
 future; but I have learned this much anyhow: I shall 
 sneer only at the men who are, as I shall for the mo- 
 ment believe, imitation experts and not true ones. The 
 real experts — experts in theory as well as practise will 
 always observe me in the act of taking my hat off to 
 them; even if I did earn the reputation of being the 
 prize mossback of the Corn Belt by having a whip- 
 socket put on the dash of my first motor-car. More- 
 over, I am willing to concede that perhaps a majority 
 of the real farming experts of the country, aside from 
 
268 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 the successful farmers, are found in the ranks of the 
 county-agent force of the Bureau of Farm Manage- 
 ment of the Department at Washington, working with 
 the farmers in the various counties to which they are 
 accredited under the Smith-Lever Act. 
 
 All that can be done to check the ravages of chinch- 
 bugs after harvest. Freeman Clay showed me how to 
 do : I had read it of course, but it had gone into my 
 brain at the eyes and oozed out at the back of my head 
 as most things do that we read. That's the value of 
 the county agent to the fairly well-informed farmer; 
 he makes real the things which otherwise remain 
 wrapped in the haze of things only read of. Only 
 scholars really visualize things which are merely read. 
 Old Doctor Seaman A. Knapp, the father of the 
 county-agent movement, and I think the greatest edu- 
 cator America ever produced, once said to me : "When 
 a man reads a thing he doesn't know it. When you tell 
 it to him he doesn't know it. When you actually do it 
 before his eyes, he still doesn't know it. He never 
 actually knows a thing until he does it with his own 
 hands and brains." On the other hand a friend of 
 mine in New York, who likes to deal in contradictions, 
 is fond of saying that you can't teach any person any- 
 thing he doesn't already know. Both these men are 
 absolutely right. I knew, in the way one of them 
 meant, how to check the invasions of chinch-bugs 
 marching from the stubble into the com; but I never 
 really knew it in the way meant by the other until after 
 I had worked it odt with Freeman Clay, and found out 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 269 
 
 how far too late it is to tackle these pests after they 
 have got their big summer start. 
 
 "Anyhow," said Freeman, "this is no time to start 
 on chinch-bugs. Over in Lincoln Township the farm- 
 ers are going to go after the next year's bugs this fall." 
 
 "So am I," said I; though I hadn't thought of it 
 until that moment. 
 
 "Grood," said Freeman; "you can get most of 'em 
 that way." 
 
 "Um — how would you advise going about it," I 
 asked cautiously, "er — ^under our conditions?" 
 
 "Well," he answered, "there's no use fighting them 
 individually. It's a community proposition. They're 
 going at it on a township scale over in Lincoln." 
 
 "So are we," said I — for I'd be darned if I'd admit 
 I was plumb ignorant of the whole business after be- 
 ginning with a bluff. Not that we didn't both know 
 that I'd been bluffing; but he is so young, and I'm so 
 old, you see. "Can you come over and help us organ- 
 ize the movement?" 
 
 "Sure !" said Freeman. "That's what I'm paid for. 
 And I harbor a bitterness toward chinch-bugs that 
 makes me feel a savage joy in such a frolic." 
 
 Well, what with the help of Tom Whelpley, Frank 
 Wiggins and the leaders among the boys and girls, we 
 did make a frolic — and we cleaned them out for the 
 next year. We raked and burned over all the roadsides 
 so there was no wintering places for eggs of bugs. We 
 left no patch of weeds uncut or tmbumed. We 
 scourged the swales of matted vegetation as with fire 
 
270 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 and sword; and gave a shampoo to a lot of lawns and 
 orchards which had not been under the barber's care 
 once in their whole history. We went through groves 
 and hedges with fine-tooth combs ; and the smoke of 
 our holocausts ascended to heaven like Indian signal 
 fires for two or three days. 
 
 We divided the country into sections of two square 
 miles each, and chose up squads, which were scored by 
 a committee composed of Doctor Faville, Jeff Sharpe, 
 and Ethel Wyatt Fisher, fifty points being allowed each 
 for speed and efficiency. The best three squads got 
 badges which we sent off for, to be won three years in 
 succession in order to be permanently possessed. And 
 we had a dance and feast at the schoolhouse when it 
 was all over. We were that much to the good, no mat- 
 ter what the effect on the bugs ; but I really think it did 
 a lot of good. The next year we had no chinches to 
 speak of; and they had a good many in sections where 
 no bugging contest was held. I suppose, too, that we 
 destroyed a great many other bad insects of which we 
 knew nothing. You almost always do better than you 
 expect by being thorough. I reckon that the San Jose 
 scale has been a good thing for the fruit industry; 
 when you spray for scale you rid the orchard of pests 
 of which you never had any suspicion. 
 
 This started a kind of intimacy between me and 
 Freeman Clay, and gave me a new slant on the county- 
 agent business. I began taking rides with him in his 
 car or mine, in which we pretty well explored the 
 county. I never realized before how ignorant is the 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 271 
 
 average fanner of what is going forward on the farms 
 within two hours' run ; and I came to believe that we 
 haven't yet really domesticated the automobile as a 
 farm tool. It lays all the farm skill of the coimtryside 
 under contribution for the farmer who likes to know 
 what the real practical farmers, not the theorists, are 
 doing. It began with excursions with Freeman Clay 
 to see what other neighborhoods were doing in the 
 anti-chinch-bug war ; and I found that he was canying 
 that war into Africa pretty well all over the county. I 
 calculate that in this thing alone he saved the county 
 several times his salary — for we should never have 
 done it if we hadn't had a county hired man to do the 
 drudgery of dragooning us into it. 
 
 Pretty soon, however, he began showing me other 
 things. Before I knew it, I had joined with six others 
 to buy bulls cooperatively. You must understand that 
 the bull is just exactly half the herd so far as improve- 
 ment is concerned, and as it is cheaper to buy good 
 blood in one animal than in ten or twenty or forty, he 
 is really a good deal more than half from the practical 
 view-point. 
 
 "Do you know," said Freeman to me, "how many 
 great sires are never recognized as such until after they 
 have gone to the block ?"' 
 
 He went on and told me of scores of great cows 
 whose sires had been dead before it became known 
 what great and valuable animals they were. So we or- 
 ganized this bull club to get good animals, and keep 
 them, passing them from farm to farm among us until 
 
272 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA ' 
 
 they were aged and tested. Some of these days we'll 
 be found showing the Missourians what's what in 
 breeding — ^all by the exercise of a little common sense 
 in doing things together instead of separately, and sav- 
 ing on overhead charges all the time. Since then I have 
 made the same sort of arrangement with breeders of 
 my kind of swine, also; and the women and boys are 
 doing the same thing with a bred-to-lay strain of 
 chickens introduced by Mrs. Wilberforce Fogg. They 
 figure on making the two-hundred-egg hen a back- 
 number by developing whole flocks of two-hundred- 
 and-fifty-egg hens, thereby adding to the national 
 wealth a figure one and a whole hatful of naughts. We 
 find these things very fascinating, and lots better things 
 to gossip about than others which might be mentioned. 
 All this showed me the value of the county agent. 
 Our neighborhood was all right as a neighborhood ; but 
 it was not large enough for the cooperation and the 
 organization we needed. For instance, when the Fed- 
 eral Farm Loan Act was passed it was not in the Fair- 
 view settlement that the first National Farm Loan 
 Association was formed for the purpose of getting the 
 benefit on the farm of the building-and-loan association 
 idea which has done so much in the cities ; but over on 
 Beaver Creek quite out of our bailiwick. Freeman 
 Clay found out that several farmers over there needed 
 loans on long time for slow-fruiting improvements, 
 and while he didn't appear in their organization, he did 
 figure out for them that by borrowing money for 
 thirty-five years, with the privilege of paying off in 
 
! UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 273 
 
 whole or in part after five years, that they could earn 
 more than twice the interest charge, and not be worried 
 about the mortgage ever falling due. They have the 
 right to call their own loans at any time after five 
 years, and nobody else on earth has that power over 
 them. In other words, for the first time in the history 
 of the American farmer, the borrower, rather than the 
 lender, is to have the say about time and terms. 
 
 The Beaver Creek people are admitting a Fairview 
 borrower to their association occasionally. The Rev- 
 erend Frank Wiggins was the first of us to go in, so as 
 to get the money to finance a silo and a lounging-bam 
 for his cows — ^he is abandoning the stanchion system, 
 though I think he is wrong in this. The money through 
 the government system costs five and a half per cent. 
 One per cent more, making six and a half per annum, 
 will "amortize" or "kill off" the mortgage in thirty-five 
 years. Frank figures that, even on a fifteen-acre farm, 
 he can easily make the silo pay him ten per cent, on the 
 investment by keeping the silage made in seasons of 
 excessive crops and for bad seasons when feed is scarce 
 through drought or something of the sort. 
 
 "There is never a time," sajrs he, "three years to- 
 gether when a silo will not pay for itself in whole or 
 in great part by giving the dairyman feed when other- 
 wise he would have to buy dear or sacrifice a part of 
 his herd. It doesn't pay, perhaps, to fill a silo in Sep- 
 tember and begin emptying it in October; but give me 
 silage in August every year when the pastures are 
 short, or the silage of wet 1912 kept over for dry 1914, 
 
274 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 and I'll sHow you profits on the silo tha? will make 
 both interest and ariiortization look small." 
 
 This is pretty sensible talk for a preacher ; and I was 
 gratified to see Frank developing sound business sense 
 along with his visionary ideas. I discovered, however, 
 that he probably got it from the county agent. Freeman 
 Clay, who was preaching all over the county the fact 
 that the new Federal Farm Loan Act is making it nec- 
 essary for the farmers to figure interest on investments 
 instead of first costs. 
 
 "Don't ask me what this will cost," he used to say to 
 the farmers we visited, "when you can get the money 
 on your own time at low rates of interest whenever 
 you want it. Ask yourself what interest it will pay on 
 the investment. If it costs you two hundred and fifty 
 dollars a year, and pays you four hundred dollars you 
 can add one hundred and fifty dollars a year to your 
 labor income by borrowing. Instead of a mortgage 
 being a disgrace under such circumstances, it is a dis- 
 credit not to have one." 
 
 He pointed out to me the fact that the small borrower 
 now has an equal chance with the big one. Now it has 
 been for a long time a fact in the Corn Belt that the 
 farmer who doesn't need a loan of at least four or five 
 thousand dollars isn't of much consequence to the loan 
 companies, though for the big loans we certainly have 
 already had good credit at rather low rates. Person- 
 ally I never felt that it was good business to encumber 
 my farm for two or three thousand dollars; and I 
 never needed all that my farm would stand in the way 
 of a loan; but lots of men who could borrow ten thou- 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 275 
 
 sanH if they had to, could use a quarter of that as 
 working capital at a profit. I began figuring on the 
 thing; and Freeman and I worked the problem out in 
 this way : I might take, say, twenty-five hundred dol- 
 lars in a Federal Farm Loan and use it in developing 
 my feeding operations. I could, for instance, get the 
 money cheaper in that way for buying lambs to put in 
 my corn-fields after harvest to clean up the pigeon grass 
 that naturally comes in, and eat the lower foliage of 
 the com and the rape I might sow between the rows, 
 and make fifty cents or a dollar a head by the opera- 
 tion. It's good farming to do it, too. Or I might take 
 advantage of the market to buy any other stock — ^when 
 it is cheap, or steers, or heifers, or sheep as my feed 
 made it possible. That much money ought to pay for 
 itself and a little besides, as I'm fixed. 
 
 "But," said I, "as I turned these deals the money 
 would come in, and would be idle at times, and all the 
 while I'd be paying interest on it. That's an objec- 
 tion." 
 
 "You ought to figure to keep it busy," said he; 
 "that's a part of the business of a business farmer. 
 There ought to be a text-book published on the use of 
 money under the Federal Farm Loan Act. It's going 
 to be the most important part of the farmer's business 
 from now on. As for your periods of idle money, 
 why not invest it when it must be idle in Federal Farm 
 Loan bonds, and cut down your loss of interest to a 
 per cent, or half a per cent.? You ought to be able 
 to stand that for the sake of having a supply of work- 
 ing capital." 
 
276 JHE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 I am so much impressed with the idea that I believe 
 I'll join the Beaver Creek National Farm Loan Asso- 
 ciation and indulge in the luxury of keeping two or 
 three thousand extra dollars working for me all the 
 time. That's how the new law will help the farmers 
 with big investments in their farms. If I don't like 
 the scheme, I'll pay off after five years. I feel perfectly 
 sure I can make money by the transaction; and I surely 
 can't lose much. 
 
 This sort of business farming is coming to be a 
 great part of the county agent's work in the Corn Belt. 
 To be sure he still looks after the A B C of farming, 
 in cow-testing associations, boys' and girls' clubs, pig 
 clubs, acre-3rield contests, seed com campaigns, calf 
 fairs, colt fairs, egg-circles, beef rings, and county 
 short courses for the young people; but in a community 
 like Fairview, already well socialized by such people 
 as our school force and the Wigginses, he has to rise 
 to a higher plane. He has reached this, too, in another 
 movement he inaugurated. This was the contest of 
 Extensive vs. Intensive Farming. 
 
 Frank Wiggins is an enthusiastic exponent of the 
 small farm. "I tell you," said he to Freeman Clay and 
 some more of us one day, "Doctor Spillman's investi- 
 gators in the Department of Agriculture may show 
 that as farming is now done, here, in Chester County, 
 Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, the big farm pays the 
 better labor income, but what they say isn't the last 
 word. My little fifteen-acre patch of glebeland is 
 nearer the last word." 
 
 "You don't make the labor income off it," said Free- 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 217. 
 
 man Qay, "that Mr. Dunham, or Mr. Bohn, or any of 
 the other big fanners make on their operations." 
 
 "True," said Frank, "but see who does their work, 
 and see who does mine. My work is done by a self- 
 respecting citizen of the community who has a happy 
 wife, doing good things in the community, and a cou- 
 ple of healthy babies. Who does Mr. Bohn's work, 
 or Mr. Sharpe's?" 
 
 "Hoboes," said Jeff. i 
 
 Abel Bohn nodded. So did I. 
 
 "You big farmers," said Frank, "make your labor 
 incomes out of men who drift out in the farming sea- 
 son, and in the winter spend their time in lodging- 
 houses for down-and-outers in St. Louis and Chicago, 
 and eke out the time before the spring elections by 
 selling their votes to corrupt ward politicians for beer 
 and a warm place by the radiator. They are the Huns 
 and Vandals who will tear down our Greater Rome. 
 With my little labor income, I live like a king, and I'm 
 a good citizen. Yours is not clean money, my friends 
 — ^mine is I" 
 
 There was a long pause during which I waited for 
 some one readier-witted than I to show Frank the fool- 
 ishness of his visionary stuff. Finally Freeman Clay 
 spoke up. 
 
 "I have been thinking," said he, "that it might be 
 instructive if we made a comparison of the results, even 
 in labor income, between the small farm well tilled, and 
 the large farm. What the Department of the state 
 stations have published show only average results. 
 Average results in Mexico or Argentina would damn 
 
278 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 the farm of a thousand acres as against the ranch of 
 twenty thousand to a, million. The question is what 
 do both show in profits under the best conditions?" 
 
 "In profits," said Frank; "and in men, women and 
 children." 
 
 "Yes," said Freeman Clay, "and in social vahies. 
 Of course they come in; but not for the economist." 
 
 "So much the worse," said Frank, "for the econom- 
 ist. What is Uncle Abner's bank roll worth, if it 
 means a man or two every winter rotting in a Chicago 
 saloon, and corrupting Chicago politics ?" 
 
 "Suppose," said Freeman, "that we run a contest be- 
 ginning March first, between a dozen small farms and 
 a dozen large ones ?" 
 
 "I'm in !" said the preacher. . 
 
 "And you'll be in," said I, "with fifteen acres of the 
 richest land out-of-doors, because you flim-flammed 
 me out of a marsh, and wheedled Abel here into letting 
 you pump the water across the road on him ! Do you 
 call that fair?" 
 
 "I do !" exclaimed Frank. "I'm making billions of 
 blades grow, Uncle Abner, where you and Brother 
 Bohn, by your mulishness, made cat-tails , and wild 
 parsnips grow; and never would have done any bet- 
 ter." 
 
 "That," said Abel, "is true, Brother Dunham." 
 
 Well, we had the contest. I went in, and so did 
 Abel, and Jeff Sharpe and Wilson Beebe, and enough 
 more farmers to make a dozen. Frank's farm was the 
 baby of the small holders, and the others ran from 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 279 
 
 forty acres up to eighty — ^all small farms for this part 
 of the country. I never took so much pains with my 
 farming since I broke the prairie in the seventies. 
 Freeman Clay, impartial as a judge, went from farm to 
 farm, big and little alike, and talked things over with 
 us. There was a good deal of excitement at our County 
 Farm Bureau Meetings, and a lot of mental money 
 changed hands on the outcome. The state experts got 
 interested. The results are embodied in the first bul- 
 letin published by our County Farm Bureau, written 
 by Freeman Clay. Jeff Sharpe's income was by all 
 odds the largest ; but I was beaten by Peter Barto, with 
 his little dinky forty-eight-acre farm and his ten-cow 
 dairy. We eliminated truck farms and orchards, be- 
 cause we wanted the race to be run by real farmers 
 motmted on real farms, and there is no doubt that 
 Pete's is such a one. Here's his record for the year, 
 giving him more than two hundred dollars more than 
 I made on my operations : 
 
 INCOME. 
 
 Milk checks $1,500 
 
 Hogs 300 
 
 Fruit 100 
 
 Poultry and poultry products 100 
 
 Calves sold for veal 65 
 
 Seed grain sold 150 
 
 Stock sold 450 
 
 Simdries 40 
 
 Total receipts $2,705 
 
280 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 EXPENSES. 
 
 Feed $400 
 
 Labor 40 
 
 Silo filling and threshing 25 
 
 Seed purchased 25 
 
 Taxes 26 
 
 Insurance 6 
 
 Sundries 100 
 
 $622 
 
 Interest on investment, $8,000, 6% 480 
 
 Depreciation 300 
 
 Total expenses $1,402 
 
 Labor income $1,303 
 
 Now this makes Peter Barto easily the real vfrinner 
 of the contest, though other large farms besides the 
 Sharpe place brought in more labor income than did 
 Pete's. Pete had a good income when it is considered 
 that all the produce the family consumed for their 
 living is left out of the account; and when it is fur- 
 ther taken into the reckoning that the average labor 
 income of the American farmer is from two hundred 
 to four hundred dollars after allowing him interest on 
 his investment at five per cent, instead of six, as was 
 done in our contest. You see Pete's folks had $1,782 
 to spend that year when their interest on investment 
 was added to their labor income — ^and they had this 
 after they had got a good part of their living off the 
 little farm. 
 
 Note, too, that Pete's folks did practically all their 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 281 
 
 own work ; but don't think that the Bartoes lived be- 
 low American standards. They have running water 
 in the house, a fine bathroom, furnace heating and a 
 gasoline lighting system; and Pete's car cost more 
 than mine. They used it, too, in a sensible way; and 
 as liberally as people can who do their own work. 
 They have a milking machine for their cows, and 
 every up-to-date thing which ought to distinguish well- 
 to-do American farming. Their farming is not fancy, 
 but staple farming. The basis of it is ten cows, not 
 pure-breds, but grade Holsteins, that bring in from 
 $102.30 per year, the record that year of the poorest, 
 to $208.23 per year which was earned by his best, a 
 prize-winning milker. 
 
 Barto was not, like Frank Wiggins, blessed with a 
 farm of exceptional richness. It was badly run down 
 when he bought it fifteen years or so ago. He labored 
 under a mortgage, too, for years, and paid it off from 
 his earnings. He made his original start on a small 
 farm, and his whole proposition is a small-farm suc- 
 cess. He keeps on the farm the ten cows, a team of 
 horses, and some young stock, besides the poultry and 
 the automobile. His success has been made with cows, 
 tile drain, clover, and barnyard manure. 
 
 This demonstration was made by Freeman Clay, I 
 feel sure, for the purpose of showing the Department 
 of Agriculture that there is something yet to be said 
 as between extensive farming and intensive farming. 
 Frank Wiggins, whose record was pretty good, was 
 exultant. He preached a sermon the next Sunday, on 
 
282 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 the text, "I went by the field of the slothful and by the 
 vineyard of the man void of understanding," in which 
 he showed, to his own satisfaction at least, that Free- 
 man Clay is tilling his own particular field, to wit, this 
 county — ^mighty well, and that the fellows who speak 
 for the big farm just because the big farm pays best, 
 as it is farmed on the average, are the men void of 
 understanding. 
 
 Not that I think this just. I believe that one of 
 these days the Department will come out with a study 
 of the small farm which will tell us something about 
 what they call successful departures from the norm 
 toward more intensive farming. In fact, a few years 
 ago they did this very thing, but have since discredited 
 the Bulletins on Small Farms with matter which seems 
 opposed to their lessons. Not that I have become a 
 believer in intensive farming of the sort preached by 
 the Little Landers — ^who, it seems to me are just plain 
 crazy. But there is a middle ground between the 
 pocket-handkerchief farming of Japan and the all-out- 
 doors kind which the experts now seem to favor. ITbe 
 big farm is morally wrong, as long as there are peo- 
 ple who want farms and can't get them." 
 
 I think I must have made plain by this time the func- 
 tion of Uncle Sam in Fairview. It is to show us that 
 no matter how well organized a neighborhood may be, 
 the county agent is needed. Uncle Sam, through the 
 county agent, possesses the power to spread the good 
 things of our Fairviews over whole counties, states, 
 and finally over the whole nation, north, south, east 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 283 
 
 and west; and to build up Fairviews where they are 
 not. To put a missionary of good farming in every 
 county in every farming region in the United States is 
 an epochal thing. 
 
 Unless this is done as a permanent thing, however, 
 the Smith-Lever Act will fail to do its duty. It is 
 rather sad to see that the poorest regions in every 
 state are the last to get this help — so that it still fails 
 to reach the people who need it most. It might have 
 been better, for instance, to have set Freeman Clay 
 working in one of the twenty-three counties in South- 
 em Illinois which, at last accounts, because they can 
 not pay their portions of the agents' salaries, have no 
 county agents, than to have had him sent to our county 
 where we were doing pretty well without him. Any 
 educational law which succeeds where education is 
 general, and fails where it is needed, is not altogether 
 a perfect law. 
 
 So this will be about all from your Uncle Abner 
 Dtuiham on the Fairview Idea. It is the greatest idea 
 in the world. It relates to the improvement of the big- 
 gest business of all Big Business — Farming. This is a 
 business which has been all hands and no head. The 
 Fairview Idea will give it head. It shows that the 
 country church may not only be as good a church as 
 that of the city, but a better one, we think, than any 
 city can possibly produce. It shows that the rural 
 school may be and ought to be a better school than any 
 city school can possibly be. It shows that country life 
 
284 THE FAIRVIEW IDEA 
 
 »=^poor anil sordid as it usually is — ^may be richer and 
 fuller than city life at its best. The Fairview Idea has 
 the power to transmute a stand-pat farming reaction- 
 ary into an agricultural progressive with something of 
 the apostoKc in his heart. And why not? For ages 
 society has taken bread from the farmer's hand, and 
 given him back a stone; from him it has received fishes 
 and paid for them in serpents. 
 
 For many of us older people not much may be done ; 
 but think of the unending generations of little girls and 
 boys coming on and on out of the fruitful womb of 
 time to tread the furrows of America to the end that a 
 world may be fed and clothed ; and to receive for these 
 things, what? The sordid things, the false things, 
 and the useless things which have been given to them in 
 the past; or that vital enlightenment of which my New 
 England ancestors must dimly have dreamed when 
 they set up free institutions, and free schools ? 
 
 For the farm boys and girls of the future there must 
 be justice and opportunity according to the measure 
 of the ages in which they are to live. Opportunity to 
 know, to live, and to seek the truth. Some disquieting 
 truth we have encountered in Fairview; but all truth 
 is good. Even though we hook the Midgard Snake, 
 still we must go on fishing in the ocean of human 
 knowledge. Whatever of change is necessary for the 
 working out of justice as between Man and the Land 
 is b^ond me to say; but I feel sure that such changes 
 as are essential can be made by that farming people 
 only who really live and think, and by their living and 
 
UNCLE SAM IN FAIRVIEW 285 
 
 thinking are brought to the envisagement of their own 
 tremendous problems — ^the basic problems of the 
 world ; because they are the questions growing out of 
 the relations of Man to the Planet out of which he 
 comes, on which he lives, and into which he dissolves. 
 The Fairview Idea carried to its logical development, 
 will give the farmers of the future such a life. Where 
 Truth leads is none of our business. It is ours to fol- 
 low her unquestioningly, making sure first of only one 
 fact — is she really Truth? 
 
 THE END