The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1919-09-23
The Farmers Life and Home

A high-paid worker in one of the skilled
trades protesting to a farmer against the
existing prices of foodstuffs.
do you realize" replied the farmer, that if
workers in the country were paid on the scale
that you are steaks would cost you dollar a
pound?"
The farmer and his men have toiled for so
many years for small returns that we seem to
take it for granted that they should keep on
doing so forever. The rest of us feel sense of
personal injury when learn that the farmer
is trying to keep abreast, even if only in partial
degree, with the upward trend of prices and
standards of living. He has always been accus-
toned to work from daylight until dark for
}neager returns, and to get along without the
conveniences and comforts that make city life
agreeable. What's wrong with him that he isn't
willing to continue?
mot so many years ago." related the farmer,
II picked twenty bushels of apples from my trees
to haul to the market town twenty miles away.
It took all of one day. Driving to the city over
sandy roads took the half of the night that was
left after I had MIXED the cows and done the
other chores. Times were hard, and had to sell
the apples from house to house, peck at time,
at twenty-five cents a bushel. 1t was nearly sun
down when the load was sold, and it was eleven
o'clock at night when got home again, with five
dollars in my pocket Five dollars for two days
and two nights of drudgery"
The well-informed knows that this instance
is typical of the experience Of farmers for many
years. To vary the monotony, there have always
been the scale, and the bugs. and the worms, and
the drouth, and the destructive early frosts, to
come along and ruin seasons crops and blight
the hopes of many months.
Conditions are better in the country now, but
they not much improved conditions
FOR workers in the city. Indeed, the difference
is so considerable that many farm regions
being drained of active young men, who go to
town to work in factories or on the railroads.
Forty years ago when farmer built house
for himself he was apt to put into it all the skill
and art that he could command, feeling that he
was creating homestead to hand down to his
children. Now, with the young folk so apt to
leave early for the Cities the farmer builds only
for the present. He puts up all too often mere
shelter to cover him only until he scrape to-
-gether enough of a competence to enable him to
sell the farm and go to some town to escape rack
ing toll in his declining years.
We are quite apt to hear when railroad
or coal miners gather in convention that theirs
is the basic industry; that everything depends
primarily upon them.
Is this true? Well, God help them if the farm
ers ever decide collectively to stop selling wheat
and meat and wool and cotton! We would quick
" find out then which is the basic, the vitality
important industry.
century ago, before modern industrialism
came in, the farmer landed proprietor and
a man of dignity and consequence. His home was
a manor house, graced with the best domestic
equipment and furniture that he could obtain.
His grounds were carefully planned and were
adorned with good shrubbery and charming gar
dens. The home social center, and the chill
dren glad to remain within the sphere of