divine disfavor that has destroyed this crop. It is just as impossible
that a woman should have a beautiful child if she has been the victim of
overstrain for ten years before that child is born, as it would be to
get a good crop from absolutely untilled ground. The home is the field
for the harvest of children. That ground must be cultivated as carefully
and assiduously as any other, or the harvest will bring no honor to the
family.

If the young girls in the farmstead do not measure up to the standard,
will they try to do what is in their power to make themselves more
strong, fit, and beautiful? It will take six weeks of hard, unremitting
work, by night and day and every hour in the day, to turn a
round-shouldered girl into a well-shaped, straight-shouldered, elastic
figure. Is it worth while? The result will be a girl with better
breathing capacity, more vigor, more beautiful carriage, and in every
way better prepared for a happy life. There are some wrongs that are
done to the young people by neglect of the laws of health that never can
be made up to them. But there is much that can be done, and perhaps it
is not too late to correct some errors and to make up for some losses.
Health conditions on many farms are not up to the mark and among the
causes of this the Report of the Commission on Country Life mentions the
too long hours of work. There are of course other causes. Three meals a
day of pork and bread, seven days in the week, fifty-two weeks in the
year, year in and year out the same, will never produce blooming
youngsters, especially if we are speaking of the delicate constitutions
of girls. Nor will bedrooms hermetically sealed from air during half of
the breathing time, favor development of lung-capacity.

Theoretically, the farm should be the most healthful place for the
growth of human beings; and wherever sanitary conveniences are
installed, health conditions need no betterment. The point is not that
the rural people have declined from a former better condition, but that
they have not gone forward so fast as they might. While the residents of
cities have at the command of new science been making swift progress in
sanitation, working vigorously on the problems of pure food, good water,
the suppression of tuberculosis, pellagra and other diseases, the
country people have not so swiftly answered the call.

Such movements as, for instance, the one to provide pure milk for
babies, lower the death rate in