y aid those in command
of agricultural life which is more than all things else the difficulty
that must be faced, wrestled with, and overcome if we would keep
adequate numbers on the farms. The effect of the drift away from the
country upon general family life is too evidently bad to need any
intensive statement here. The congestion of cities, the street life of
children which makes legal offenses of acts natural and necessary to
free play, the walking of city streets by armies of unemployed fathers
and those who might be fathers while harvests are lost for want of
laborers, the lack of food in one stratum of society while in another
there are no people to eat what nature provides so abundantly--all
this and more rises in the mind of everyone who understands that in
the right adjustment of agriculture to the people's needs lies the
best interests of all. The sorry picture of the haggard woman, widow,
deserted, or divorced, scrubbing on her knees all night long the
marble floors of a vast office-building, to hurry back to her
locked-in children in the early morning hours, to fall exhausted on
the bed until the call of the alarm clock to get breakfast and send
the little ones to school--this picture has been portrayed often to
Consumer's League and Women's Club audiences and has made many women
of position and of influence call for drastic prohibition of such
overwork of mothers. It has also made women work diligently until they
secured forms of help from the public purse to subsidize such mothers
and give them state aid until the children were able to earn something
for themselves. There are many who can visualize that scrubwoman, and
who can place beside her as needing social aid the sewing-machine
operator, the garment-finisher or the flower-maker in the tenement
sweatshop, who can not see that the farm-house mother is often
subjected to labor conditions that sap life and health and doom her
children to weakness. These opposite poles of woman's work both call
for better social understanding and more intelligent and devoted
social work. The scrubwoman, or the poverty-bound tenement worker may
be proper subjects for public or private philanthropy; the farm-house
mother is or should be the prime object of social justice and social
engineering for ends of social well-being. Upon the farmer and his
wife and also upon the miner and his wife and the forest worker and
his wife rest the very foundations of economic stability and