The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1902-06-03
THE DRUDeERY OF PARKING.

complain about what he is pleased to
call the drudgery of farming, we are
forced to the conclusion that there is
either something strong with him or
with his farming, or quite likely both.
1t is quite true that there is a lot of
hard, dirty, disagreeable work con-
nected with actual farming; however,
there is not half as much now as there
was in our boyhood days. It is not
pleasant work to clean out stables,
milk kicking COWS, perform the surgi-
cal operations necessary on the farm,
nor dig bitches through the sloughs
and swales, nor to cut heavy, tangled
corn with a corn knife, nor to thrash
dusty grain on a hot day. There is
also a good deal of discouraging work
about a farm; work that has to be
done and yet does not furnish any
very brilliant prospects of profit.
There are also inconvenience about
farm life; isolation from good neigh
bors, sometimes from any neighbors,
lack of postal facilities, bad roads, etc.
The farmers, however, do not have
the monopoly of dirty work, disagree
able work, or improbable work. Other
professions have their full share of it.
1t is not pleasant for the doctor to
treat patients who have the itch or
the smallpox, or any form of conta-
gious disease, nor is it pleasant to
treat old Sores, or carve human beings
with the knife, particularly lovely wo-
men. 1t is not pleasant for the law
yer to spend days and nights digging
out musty precedents, or watching
his opponent trying to bride jurors, or
wOrming the truth out of witnesses
who will lie if they can. 1t is not
pleasant for the dentist to smell the
breath of patients that have bad teeth,
or do work for people who are so ner-
vous that they can not endure a little
bit of necessary pain.
Every profession and business has
it's dirty, hard, and disagreeable work.
Whether the work is drudgery or not
depends more on the attitude of the
mind towards it than anything else.
In other words, it is call in you
mind" If we are really interested in
the work or in the results aimed at
and the mind is fully occupied in find
ing out how best to do it and with the
least work and inconvenience; in
short, if the heart is really in it, the
whole energy of mind and body is di-
rected to the accomplishment of the
work, and then it ceases to be drudg-
cry and becomes educational in that
its performance e~levates manhood.
If a man has no taste nor liking for
farming, but goes at it simply because
he is not fit for anything else, then
all his work necessarily becomes
drudgery and he might almost as well
be a galley slave. The best thing for
him to do is to find out something he
really would like to do that will make
him a living and quit farming and go
and do that even if he commences with
bread and water pay. He will in time
learn to do it better and be worth
more to the man who employs him
and may get some good out of life. If
a farmer dOes not like to work at all {;
in other words, if he is inherently
lazy, then of course every kind of
work is drudgery, and for all the good
he is to himself or his fellow men he
might as well be dead and buried. The
world will get along just as well
without him.
The way to take d~rudgery out of
work, even the most disagreeabIe, is
to find in it employment not merely
for the body but for the intellect, and
there is no class of men living who
can so easily find abundant exercise
for all the mental ability that the
good Lord has given them, be it ever
so much, as the men who live on west
ern farms. The man in the factory
who merely polishes shovels, or heads
pins, or does some very minute por-
ton of the work, is simply a very lit
tie pivot, crank, or wheel in a very
big machine and can not in the nature
of things find very much intellectual
enjoyment in his work and must find
mental diversion in something out
side of his work, that becomes auto
matte as soon as he becomes really ex-
pert in it.
Before the farmer lies the p,vO+or;oo