The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-20
WHY THEY LEAVE THE COUNTRY
From the St. Louis Republic.

From the St. Louis Republic.
 ~ IXTY per cent of the young men who wear blue uniforms and the hot weather straw caps on the troll ley cars are farmers sons. Most of them have pulled and tugged at pnw lines over | the backs of refractory mules long before they ever pulled bell cord.
 Half the clerks in the big railway of- CT cities and the little railway stations where the fast trains never stop. Fifty out of every hundred of the young men who are putting kinks in their spines and ruining their eyesight over long columns of freight earnings and ton miles, " know when to plant potatoes and how | to blow corn.
 | Every other waitress in the quick lunch | places downtown was once a country | lassie. That is, they were born and raised up in one of those little towns that dot and spec6le the state maps.
 l Thirty out of every forty of the men who run trains, hammer telegraph keys and make out bills of lading for the rail- way systems were recruited from the ! farms.
 Many of the little stenographers who scurry in and out of the office buildings at the lunch hour were once upon time little pig-tailed lassies, who played about the big yards of some little half-forgotten town with elm shaded streets.
 When middle aged man or woman | h haf home there, it is nine chances to ten that they have failed at everything they have ever tried in the little cities, and have come to the big town to start boarding or rooming house.
 | And nine out of every ten of them is | certain that the- city, any city, is the | very swickedest of wicked places. Back in the country, where they come from, the big town was held up to them as a symbol of sin. The older folks talked in low tones of it's snares and pitfalls, of l'the sin and degradation that were every where in the big town.
 Why do they come? Many of them fail and drag themselves back to take up life where they left it out on the farms. The great majority manage to live on the
 salaries they receive, or the wages they are able to earn. few of them become wealthy and successful and are able to
 go, back and buy up a whole township around the old homestead if they desire. | J. Hood is street car conductor. He has been picking up nckels and stopping and starting a car for some months. He
 makes no prncely salary. nothing like
 what he dreamed Of making when he came into St. Louis off the farm -autr ap- piled for job. Position" he called fl
 then and that was the way the little paper back home spoke of it later on. If lie works every day, full time, and req sonable amount of overtime, he cannot make as much as he would if he had stayed by the farm. f9 i
 He realizes this and has gone bach home once or twice convinced that he would stay there and blow corn and cal hogs to the end of his days. He came back in less than a week. Things were too still and too terribly quiet. He was l used to that monotonous undertone of 2 great town, steadily drawing It's breath He could listen to the mournful call ol the whippoorwil, but his heart hungeree ] for the screech and clang or trolley wheels grinding arounds a sharp curve l He came back from his last visit In Jus "A hours.
 q came back.'' he says, because wa
 lonesome couldn't sleep in my old room under the caves. in sound of the katydid for thinking of the crowds and the iight' and of how Broadway looked, or whether some fellow T hated happened to hav' my old run. So lad my old man hitcl