kers who
realize the vital part played by food in the winning of the war. As the
modern industrial system has developed with its marvels of specialized
machinery, its army of employees gathered and dispersed on the stroke of
the clock, and strong organizations created to protect the interests of
the worker, the calm and quiet processes of agriculture have in
comparison grown colorless. The average farmhand has never found push
and drive and group action on the farm, but only individualism to the
extreme of isolation. And now in war time, when in addition to its usual
life of stirring contacts, the factory takes on an intimate and striking
relation to the intense experience of the battle front, the work of the
farm seems as flat as it is likely to be unprofitable. The man in the
furrow has no idea that he is "backing up" the boy in the trench.

The farmer in his turn does not find himself part of the wider relations
that attract and support the manufacturer. Crops are not grown on order.
The marketing is as uncertain as the weather. The farmer could by higher
wages attract more labor, but as the selling of the harvest remains a
haphazard matter, the venture might mean ruin all the more certain and
serious were wage outlay large. In response to a call for food and an
appeal to his patriotism, the farmer has repeatedly made unusual efforts
to bring his land to the maximum fertility, only to find his crops often
a dead loss, as he could not secure the labor to harvest them. I saw,
one summer, acres of garden truck at its prime ploughed under in
Connecticut because of a shortage of labor. I saw fruit left rotting by
the bushel in the orchards near Rochester because of scarcity of pickers
and a doubt of the reliability of the market. The industry which means
more than any other to the well-being of humanity at this crisis, is the
sport of methods outgrown and of servants who lack understanding and
inspiration. The war may furnish the spark for the needed revolution.
Man-power is not available, woman-power is at hand. A new labor force
always brings ideas and ideals peculiar to itself. May not women as
fresh recruits in a land army stamp their likes and dislikes on farm
life? Their enthusiasm may put staleness to rout, and the group system
of women land workers, already tested in the crucible of experience, may
bring to the farm the needed antidote to isolation.

To win the war we must have man-power in the trenches sufficient