From these figures it appears that the efflux of youth from the country was greater among the girls than among the boys, especially if we consider that those who have taken up teaching as a profession are thereby "expressing their intention not to stay on the farm if they can help it." The number of young men who have "left the country for something better" is large enough, however, to cause a lack of efficient farm labor in this. township as well as in other sections of the country.

Most of the older people feel that "the country is all right if you aren't afraid to work; you at least get enough to eat." The growing generations, however, soon come to the conclusion that "the country means work and little else." Small wonder it is then that many boys try to see if they can't "get a little of real life." "Plenty to eat," doesn't satisfy them, if they have read of the life of the great "White Way," as it is pictured in magazine stories. They feel that "there is nothing in the country for a fellow to enjoy." "People say: 'Hard work is the key to success.' The farmer gets the hard work all right, but what is the farmer's success? To have plenty to eat! To lay by a little money so that he may start out his boy in the same kind of a life that he has lived! And then to retire to town to die! That's a successful farmer's life! But is that really life?" Many farmers' boys who have read and "seen something of a different kind of existence" do not feel that they "care to repeat the old man's experiences." "Oh yes," say some, "you may tell us that we ought to be glad to hear the birds singing in the tree tops; see the beautiful spring-time blossoms and enjoy the fragrance of blooming orchards and budding roses! But you just put one of those poet fellows to work on a farm. Let him buckle in and get down to work, shocking barley for a while, and see what he feels most, the prickling itch or the beauties of a July sunset; and just notice how many birds he hears singing as he gets up at four-thirty or five o'clock the next morning. See how your budding poet enjoys the fragrance of spring-time blossoms while he is swilling the hogs in the morning dew! Oh yes, we've got the fellows in the country who say that they can see all those beauties there, but it's funny that they never stay in the country to make their living."

The modern country girl of "high-school breeding" is even more sophisticated than her brother. When "in the rush of the season's work it happens that hired help can not be gotten" such a girl may be kindhearted enough to take turns with her mother in raking and piling up the hay. She does it with the consciousness, however, that the physique and graces of the peasant type of womanhood may be charming enough to a literary connoisseur when reading the pleasing couplets that relate the romance of a rustic Maud Muller, but that "the pitchfork is not the instrument nowadays for developing the style which attracts men in real life." So also the modern milkmaid is fully aware that the girl who has to sweat

at the side of eight or ten cows each evening during the rush season, and pulls her fingers stiff and out of shape, is thereby "forced out of the running by the miss with the long slender hand and the lily fingers which can coax thrilling rhapsodies from the piano."

That is the attitude which has been developed among those "who have gone to school and become smart." But even girls with only a little schooling feel "that the country is so dead, there is nothing doing." Accordingly we have only ten per cent of the girls in this township who were willing to work out in the country. Over twenty-five per cent of the girls over eighteen had gone to work in the cities, "because there even a working girl can get five and six dollars a week while the farmers pay but three and four dollars, and in the cities you don't have to work half so hard, and can have some fun all the time." Other young women who "would not marry a farmer for love or for money," stated it as their opinion that "even a janitor, or a drayman in a city, can offer his wife more conveniences and social life than can the best of our farmers." A study of the foregoing diagrams will bring out graphically to what extent this attitude has developed among country girls.

These considerations bring us to the hired-help problem. The same things that make farm life a wearisome drudgery for the native son also tend to make farm life disagreeable to the hired man, even "doubly more so." Not only does the hired man get the same hard toilsome routine of work, but his recreation and social life is even more limited than that of the native son. There are still vestigial evidences of the old practice of wily farmers "using the charms of their daughters to keep the hired man steady and devoted to his job," but "what chance has such a man of marrying a well-to-do farmer's daughter, when she sneezes at the attentions of even the wealthiest young farmers in the neighborhood?" One prosperous

young farmer said, "It's pretty hard for just an ordinary good farmer lad to get a nice cultured girl; and you can't blame the girls either, after having read some of the novels and stuff they all are so taken in with nowadays."

It is not that laborers won't go to farms for steady work the year around because the girls in the country are "not nice to them," or because they aren't received into the country activities freely. Laborers are made to feel at home, but the same conditions that are responsible for the country youth leaving the farm for the city, are also responsible for "the hiredhelp problem." Indeed, there would be no hired-help problem for the farmer of to-day, and not much of a tenancy problem, if the youth of the country were to stay on the farm. The fact is that city life appeals more to the younger generation than does country life. And it is this that makes young men express themselves as follows: "I would just as soon commit

myself within the walls of the penitentiary as I would voluntarily tie myself down to work on a farm the year around!"

"What is the farmer to do when his sons leave him, and hired help can not be gotten to take their place?" Many say, "If this keeps on the only thing to do will be to cut down the size of farms so that the farmers can do the work themselves by coöperating during the haying and harvest seasons." But very few farmers are willing to do that. "You can't make the money on a small forty- or eighty-acre farm that you can on a hundred and sixty- or three hundred and twenty-acre farm." "No doubt, smart agricultural professors would tell us to farm less land and produce more per acre; that may feed more bankers and college men, but where is the farmer's profit going to come in, on such a scheme?" In the meantime those farmers for whom "the help problem becomes too hard" have rented out their farms, settled down in some country, city, or village, to "take whatever can be gotten in that way." Some farmers "see danger in the growth of tenancy. It means run-down farms, quack grass and Canada thistles, and no interest in what is for the best of the community as a whole." The map given in the introductory chapter shows how tenancy has spread, and various comparative diagrams in other chapters, as well as the subjoined comparative table, point out to what extent these misgivings on the part of some are well founded.

That these labor conditions are not merely local is attested by all farmers. They also say that they are "paying all that conditions will justify; anyway it isn't a matter of pay with most young men you want to hire." "Laborers admit that they can make more money on the farm than by working elsewhere, but in spite of that they won't work with a farmer steady." This points unmistakably to the conclusion that the reason farmers find the hired help problem "the big problem" is because of social conditions. "Young Americans have had it bred into them that life should offer something more than a mere bread-and-butter existence and it is the desire to get away and see something of the world, to enjoy life while you are yet young, that is causing our youth to flock to cities, drifting from one place to another, until finally when they have seen all they care for, they are no longer able or willing to settle down to the dull monotonous work that is necessary to keep business a-going." That was the way one farmer had analyzed the causes of "the social unrest and general discontent" which he held responsible for the labor problem, as it presents itself in the country.

SUMMARY OF COMPARATIVE DATA FOR OWNERS AND

TENANTS

A series of tables summarizing data as applied to owners and tenants is appended herewith and illustrates some of the many lines on which information has been gathered and tabulated, on the basis of which conclusions have been drawn in this study.

By month less than 1 year and more than 4 months 9

9

16

15

14

42

43

In Field

20

14

24

68

34

1. Machinery has decreased the amount of labor required by farmers, but a changed type of farming has made for additional work which can not be reduced to machine process.

2. A "painstaking dependable class of labor" is required to carry on successful farming as advocated by agricultural experts.

3. "The right kind of farm labor is getting scarce and increasingly difficult to get."

4. The cause of this scarcity is that foreign labor is no longer coming in to replace the native sons who "get some schooling and then try their luck in the city or go where land is cheaper."

5. The "floating hobo labor" will not tie themselves up for steady farm work the year around. Hence the "hired-help problem is the big farm problem."

6. Less than fifty per cent of the farmers read their farm papers; but there is a growth of opinion that "it is well to keep up with the times, in farming as well as other things."

7. Many farmers regard it unfair where they are charged prices high enough to maintain a city delivery service from which they derive no benefit.