comparison between Crœsus, the rich Persian king, and Leonidas, the
Greek hero. Then he compared the life of the Emperor Tiberius with that
of Jesus. It was a powerful plea for a life of service—for making full
use of training and culture. I saw my old friend the robin on his perch
outside regarding the orator critically. I take him to be one of these
exponents of a “practical” education. Very likely he was saying:
“Very fine! Very fine! ‘Words, my lord, words.’ But if I had a daughter
I would want more of housekeeping and practical homemaking in her
education. With all your culture and literature you cannot build a house
as my daughter can. You cannot tell when it is time to go South, as we
can, nor can you defend yourself against enemies as we are able to do.
All very fine, no doubt, for human beings, but if birds were educated
with any such ideas the race would be extinct in three generations.
Reading, writing and housekeeping are the only things that women need to
know.”
I have heard human robins talk in just exactly that way, and for many
years the world listened to them and believed what they said. Their talk
was about like the song of the robin, only not 10 per cent as musical.
They were opposed to the “educated” woman, and most of all to the woman’s
college. There are still some of these pessimists left. I thought of
one in particular as one by one those girls stood up to receive their
diplomas—and the robin flew away in disgust. Woman can never again be set
aside as a slave or underling or inferior partner of man. She has a right
to the best there is in life. Some of those who read this will say, “What
will become of farming if our country women get the idea that they are
entitled to education and culture, as others are?” Farming will be better
off than ever before, because when our women get this idea firmly in mind
we shall all proceed to demand the things which will enable us to give
opportunity to every country girl.
Of all the wonderful changes in the past 25 years, few have been so
remarkable as the growth of opportunity for women. The full ballot is now
to be given them, and the war opened many a door of industry. Those doors
cannot be shut. They have lost their hinges. A new element is coming into
business and political life. I do not think we need new development of
science or mechanical skill half as much as we need vision, poetry and
the finer imagination. It must be said that while man alone has done
wonders in developing material power he has failed to combine it with
spiritual power. That is what we need today more than anything else, and
I think the finely educated women are to bring it. I was thinking about
this all through that great day. Suppose my daughter and the 200 other
graduates had all been trained as lawyers, doctors, business women, etc.;
would they really benefit the world more than they will now do with
broad, strong culture and with minds stored with the best that literature
can give them? I doubt it. No matter what they may do hereafter, their
lives and their influence will be strong for this sort of training. I can
hardly think of any better missionary to go into a country neighborhood
to live than one of these hopeful, trained and useful young women. Mother
selected the college for her daughter before that young person was out
of her cradle. I thought some more practical training would be better,
but I never had a chance to argue. I now conclude that Mother was right.
She knew what she was doing, and evidently sized up the spirit of her own
flesh and blood. If you ask me what I think is the finest thing about a
college education I can quickly tell you. It is having a son or daughter
go through a great college with credit and come out wholly unspoiled by
the process. It seems to me that most people use the college as a trading
place in life. They bring away from it knowledge and culture, but they
leave behind too much of youth, too much of the plain home life, too much
of the simple, homely, kindly things which the world needs and longs for.
So that we may all pardon Mother her pride and satisfaction as she looks
down upon this big girl in cap and gown and knows that her daughter has
mastered the course at a great college and still remains _her daughter_,
with a sane and fine understanding of her relations to the home and to
society.
Ideals are what count. One of the most beautiful ceremonies of this
commencement was the placing of the laurel chain. The senior class,
dressed in white, marched to the grave where lies the founder of the
college, carrying a great chain or wreath of laurel. While the students
sang, these seniors draped the laurel around the little fence which
enclosed the grave. It was as if the youngest daughter of the college had
come to pay reverence to the founder. A beautiful ceremony, and after it
was over I went back and copied the inscription on one side of the little
monument. I have seen nothing finer as a message to educated youth.
“_There is nothing in the universe that I fear but that I shall not know
all my duty or shall fail to do it._”
“ORGANIZATION”
The other day a city man came to the farm after apples. He loaded up
his car and, rendered good-natured by eating three mellow Baldwins,
he proceeded to tell us where farmers were behind the times. It
is a pleasure for many city men to do this and the average farmer
good-naturedly listens, always glad to have his customers enjoy
themselves. This man said he wondered why farmers have never organized
properly so as to defend and control their business. It is quite easy for
a man of large affairs to see what could be done if all the farmers could
get together in a great business organization.
“The trouble with you folks is that you don’t know how to do team work,”
said my city friend. “Suppose there are twelve million farmers in the
country. Suppose they all joined and organized and pledged by all they
hold sacred to each put up $5.00 every month as a working fund. Suppose
they hired the greatest organizing brain in the country and instructed
its owner and carrier to go to it. It would simply mean world control by
the most patient and deserving class on earth. Why don’t you do it?”
That’s the way your city business man talks, and he cannot understand
why our farmers do not promptly carry out the plan. Of course that word
“suppose” takes the bottom out of most facts, but it is hard for the
business man to realize why farmers have not been able to do full team
work. This man said that large business enterprises in the city were
controlled by boards of directors. There might be men on the board who
personally hated each other with all the intensity of business hatred.
Yet when it came to a matter of business policy for the company they all
got together and put the proposition through. He said it was different
with a farmer, who if he had trouble with his neighbor over a line fence
would not under any circumstances vote for him even if he stood for a
sound business proposition.
That is the way many of these city men feel. It is largely a matter of
ignorance through not understanding country conditions. Those of us who
spend our lives among the hills can readily understand why it is hard for
a farmer to surrender a large share of his individuality and put it into
the contribution box of society. Many of us, I fear, would dodge or cheat
the contribution box in church unless we felt we were under the watchful
eye of our wives. Possibly we shall contribute more freely to society now
that our wives and daughters have the privilege of voting. When a man
has lived his life among brick and stone with ancestors who have been
constantly warned to “keep off the grass” he comes to be incapable of
understanding what is probably the greatest problem of American society.
That is the effort to keep our country people contented and feeling
that they are getting a fair share of life, so that they will continue
cheerfully to feed and clothe the world. You cannot convince a man unless
you can understand his language or read his thought. One of the worst
misfortunes of the present day is the fact that city and country have
grown apart, so that they have no common language.
Those of us who live close to Nature realize that in order to know the
truth we must find
“Tongues in trees, Books in running Brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
The trouble with the city man is that he has been denied the blessed
privilege of studying that way. Therefore, if you would make him know why
in the past it has been so difficult for farmers to organize thoroughly
you must go to the primary motives of life and not to the high school.
When our first brood of children were small, I thought it well to give
them an early lesson in organization. There were four children, and as
Spring came upon us there was a great desire to start a garden. So we
proceeded in the most orderly manner to organize the Hope Farm Garden
Association. We had a constitution and full set of rules and by-laws.
These stated the full duties of all the officers, but somehow we forgot
to provide for the plain laborers. The largest boy was President and the
smaller boy was Vice-President. My little girl was Secretary, and the
other girl Treasurer. It was an ideal arrangement, for each one held an
important office, and all were directors. I had a piece of land plowed
and harrowed. I bought seeds and tools and the Association voted to start
the garden at once. They started under directions of the President and I
went up the hill to work in the orchard. It proved to be a case where the
controlling director should have remained on the job. Halfway up the hill
I glanced back and saw the Hope Farm Garden Association headed for the
rocks. The President and Vice-President were fighting and the Treasurer
and Secretary were crying. No one was working except the black hen, and
she was industriously eating up the seeds.
I came back to save the Association if possible and the Secretary ran
to meet me with the minutes of the meeting on her cheeks. Her hands had
been in the soil and she had succeeded in transferring a portion of it
to her face. Through this deposit the tears had forced their way in a
track as crooked as the course of the Delaware River, in its effort to
carve the outline of a human face on the western coast of New Jersey. The
poor little Secretary came up the lane with the old industrial cry which
has come down to us out of the ages, tearing apart the efforts of men to
combine and improve their condition.
“_Oh! Father, don’t the President have to work?_”
The minutes of the meeting clearly revealed the trouble. It seemed
that the President of the Association made the broad claim that his
duty consisted simply in being President. There was nothing in the
constitution about his working. Of course, a dignified President could
not perform manual labor. The Secretary followed with the claim that her
duty was to write in a book; how could she do that if she worked? Then
came the Treasurer proving by the by-laws that her duty was to hold the
money; if she tried to work at the same time she might lose the cash. So
naturally she could not work. Thus it happened that there was no laborer
left except the Vice-President. He had resigned and the President was
trying to accept his resignation in italics.
These were the same children who had settled a debate on the previous
Sunday afternoon. The question was whether they would rather have the
minister read his sermon or talk off-hand. The vote was 3 to 1 in favor
of having him read it. The prevailing argument was that when the minister
read his sermon he knew when he got through. The one negative vote was
passed on the hope that when he talked off-hand he might be a little
off-head, forget one or two pages and thus get through sooner. You may
learn from that one reason why it has been so hard in the past for
certain farmers to organize.
And one reason why there has grown up an industrial advantage in the town
and city may perhaps be learned from another sermon in stones. Some years
ago we had two boys on the farm. Largely in order to keep them busy their
mother made a bargain with them to wash windows. They were to be paid so
much for each window properly cleaned. Of course their mother supposed
that the work would be done in the good old-fashioned way of scrubbing
the glass by hand with a wet cloth. The object was more to keep them busy
than to have any skilled work performed. One boy was a patient plodding
character who did not object seriously to hand labor. He took a cloth
and a pail of hot water and slowly and carefully rubbed off the glass in
the old-fashioned way. The other boy never did like to work and after
some thought he went to the neighbor’s and borrowed a small hand-pump
with a hose and fine nozzle. He filled this with hot water with the soap
dissolved in it and sprayed his windows with the hot mixture. He got them
just as clean as the other boy did, but he did three windows while his
companion was doing one. Then there arose an argument as to whether this
boy with the pump should be paid the same price per window as the other
boy who did the work by hand. These boys both went to the Sunday school
and the boy with the pump was able to refer to the parable of the man
who hired the workmen at different hours during the day. When they came
to settle up the men who had worked all day grumbled because they got
no more than the men who had worked half a day. The answer of the boss
applied to this window washing. “Did I not agree with thee for a penny?”
Now in a way the city man with his advantage in labor is not unlike the
boy with the pump. The city workman has been able to take advantage of
many industrial developments of much machinery which has not yet reached
the country. Some day there will be an adjustment and then the countryman
will have his inning.
Some years ago I spent the night with a farmer far back in a country
neighborhood. After supper he described in great detail a plan he had
evolved for organizing all American farmers in one great and powerful
body. His plan was complete and he had worked out every detail except
one which he did not seem to think essential. I looked out of the window
through the dark night and saw a light far down the road. Some neighbor
was at home. I thought it a good time for action.
“There,” I said, “is a chance to start this big scheme of yours. Down the
road I see the light from your neighbor’s window. Put on your hat, take
the hired man and your boys and we will go right down there and organize
the first chapter of this organization. No time like the present.”
The farmer’s face clouded. “Why, I haven’t spoken, to that man for three
years. He would not keep up the line fence and I had to go to law and
make him do it.”
I looked out of the window once more and saw another light to the north
of us dimly visible in the darkness. “Well, then let us go to this other
neighbor. I saw several men there as I came by.”
“That man! I wouldn’t trust him with fifty cents, and he would be sure to
elect himself Treasurer.”
“Well, far across the pasture I see still another light. Shall we go
there?”
“No, that man doesn’t know enough to go in the house when it rains.”
The farmer’s wife looked up from her sewing as if to speak, but the man
answered for her.
“Oh, the women meet at the sewing circle and church, and while they talk
about each other they keep together and do things for the neighborhood,
but somehow the men folks don’t get on.”
Yet here was a man who planned to bring all the farmers of the country
together and yet could not organize his own neighborhood, because men
were kept apart by little prejudices and fancied wrongs. The women
combined because they knew enough to realize that these petty things were
non-essential, while the great community things could only be remembered
by forgetting the meanness of every-day life.
Your city men will smile at this sermon in stones, and say that those
farmers never can forget their differences and organize. Yet city life is
worse yet. Many a man lives for years within a foot of his neighbor, yet
never knows him. There may be only a brick wall between the two families,
yet they might as well be 10 miles apart, so far as any community feeling
is concerned. If dwellers on any block in the city could combine as a
renting or buying association they would quickly settle the High Cost
of Living burden, but while their interests are all in common they are
unable to play the part of real neighbors. Farmers are coming to it
largely through their women and children and the great National Farm
Organization is by no means impossible for the future.
THE FACE OF LIBERTY
I suppose every person of middle age wears a mask. It is his face, and as
the years go by it settles into an expression of the man’s chief aim in
life, if he can be said to have one. That is why a shrewd observer can
usually tell much of a man’s character by looking keenly in his face and
observing him under excitement. One of the most observing dairymen I know
of says he can tell the quality of a cow by looking at her face. I notice
that the expert hen men who select birds for the poultry contest spend
considerable time looking at the hen’s eye and face! There she seems to
show whether she is a bad egg or a good one! Lady Macbeth put it well
when she said to her terrified husband:
“Your face, my thane, is as a book
Where men may read strange matters.”
We all go about wearing a mask, and those who care how they look may well
ask how the mask is made.
I once roomed with a young man who used to get before a mirror and
practise a smile and a laugh. He was a commercial traveler, and thought
it paid him to laugh at the jokes and smile as he talked. So he trained
the muscles of his face and throat into a machine-made twist and noise
which represented his stock in trade! He wore a mask. I have heard people
say that the face powders and massage and tricks of rolling the eyes
about gave them a mask of beauty. Not long ago I talked with a great
business man who had simply given his life up to the accumulation of
property. He had succeeded, but this success had stamped his face with a
mask as hard and flinty as steel. This man sat and told me that a good
share of his money had been made by his ability to read character in the
face. When he found a man showing indecision or fear in his features this
man knew he could handle him as he saw fit. He claimed that thought or
sentiment had little to do with it; it was simply what a man did or did
not do which made the mask of life. As for this theory that character or
sentiment “light a candle behind the face and illuminate it,” he said
that was simply “poetic nonsense.” “If a woman wanted to be thought
beautiful after she got to be forty she must rub the beauty in from the
outside.”
This seemed to me a mighty cynical theory, for the most beautiful women I
know of are over fifty and never use anything but soap and water to “rub
the beauty in.” They wear a mask which seems like concentrated sunshine,
and it comes from within. Yet my friend sat there and spoke with all the
conviction of a man who has only to write his name on a piece of paper
to bring a million dollars to support his word. And he had come to think
that is about the only support worth having. I asked him if he had ever
read Hawthorne’s story of “The Old Stone Face.” No, he had never heard of
it before—had no time for fiction or dreaming. So I told him the story
briefly; of the boy who grew up among the hills, within sight of the
“old stone face.” This was a great rock on the side of a high mountain.
The wind and the storm had slowly eaten it away until, when viewed from
a certain angle, it bore a rude resemblance to a human face. It was a
stern, gloomy, thoughtful face, and it seemed to this boy to have been
carved out of the rock by the very hand of God to show the world an ideal
of power and majesty on the human countenance. To most of the neighbors
it was merely “the old man of the mountain”—merely a common rock with an
accidental shape. But this boy grew up to manhood believing in his heart
that God had put on the lonely mountain his ideal of the mask of noble
human character. And the boy went through life thinking that if he could
only find a human being with a face like that on the mountain he would
find a great man—one carrying in his life a great message to mankind.
And so, whenever he heard of any great statesman or poet or preacher
appearing anywhere within reach this man traveled to see him in the
hope of finding the mask of the “stone face” upon the celebrity. He was
always disappointed. These great men all showed on their faces the marks
of dissipation or pride or some weakness of character, along with their
power. He would come back and look up at the face on the mountain—always
showing the same calm dignity and strength whether the happy June
sunshine played over it, or whether the January storm bit at its rude
features. So this man lived his simple life and died—disappointed because
he had never been able to find God’s ideal character worked out in a
human face! One by one men who were considered great came to the valley,
only to disappoint him, but finally, after long years of waiting and
searching, the neighbors suddenly found that their friend, who had
carried the ideal so long in his heart, also carried on his face the
nobility and grandeur of the figure on the mountain. Search for the ideal
in others had brought it home to his own life.
To my surprise, the rich and strong man who, I supposed, had no poetry or
sentiment in his heart, listened attentively and nodded his head.
“I have seen that stone face in the White Mountains. Your story of course
is a mere fancy. There might have been some idle dreamer to whom that
happened. I will not deny it, because I know of a case which is somewhat
in the same line. I confess that I would not believe it had I not seen it
myself.”
So he told his story, and I give it as nearly as possible in his own
words:
“It must have been fifteen years ago that I was returning from a
business trip to Europe. On the boat I met a college man from my city,
an expert in modern languages. We were much together on the trip, and
one day we went down into the steerage to look over the immigrants. My
friend figured that this group of strange human beings talked with him
in fifteen different languages or dialects. One family in particular
interested me. They were from the south of Poland; a man and woman of
perhaps thirty-five, with two little boys. They were of the dull, heavy,
ox-like type—mere beasts of burden in their own country. The woman seemed
to me just about the plainest, homeliest creature I had ever seen. Low
forehead, flat features, small eyes and great mouth, with huge hands and
feet, she seemed, beside the dainty women of our own party, like some
inferior animal. I offered her a good-sized bill—they looked as if they
needed it—but the woman just pulled her two black-eyed boys closer to her
and refused to take it.
“They passed out of my mind, until one fine, sunny morning old Sandy Hook
seemed to rise up out of the water, and we headed straight for New York
Harbor. I stood with my college friend in front, looking down upon the
steerage passengers as they crowded forward to get their first view of
America. Strangely enough that little Polish family that had interested
me stood right below us, and my friend could hear what they were saying.
The ship crawled up the harbor, past Staten Island, and then came to
the Statue of Liberty. Most of us have become so familiar with this
bronze beauty that we do not even glance at it. I think her strong, fine
face and uplifted torch mean little more than old-time habit to many
Americans. Not so with that flat-faced, plain Polish woman. As we came
even with the ‘bronze goddess’ this woman tore off the little shawl she
had tied around her head, reached out her hand and talked excitedly to
her husband. My college friend listened to the conversation and laughed.
“‘What is she saying?’ I asked.
“‘Why, the poor, homely thing is telling her husband that it would be
the pride and joy of her life if she could only be as beautiful as that
statue—if her face were only like that.’
“‘That is the limit. What is _he_ saying?’
“‘Just like every other husband. He is telling her that to him she is
handsomer than the old goddess, and for good measure he tells her that
under freedom in America she will come to look like “Miss Liberty.”’
“In all my life I had never heard anything so ridiculous, and I laughed
aloud. The little family below us looked up at the sound and saw we were
laughing at them. A great shadow fell over their day dream and they were
silent until we docked, though I noticed that they stood hand in hand all
the way. The story seemed so good that I told it everywhere, and it was
called the standard joke of the season.