r, in our country, the
pioneering period is not so very far back of us. We are still near to
the effects of that discipline, which developed in us the hardiness that
makes it easier for us to bear the burden of work and the strain of the
struggle than women not thus developed could sustain. For all this we
should be properly grateful and forget as soon as may be the losses that
we have been obliged to sustain while we were gaining this hardihood.

To return to the need for a wise helper and adviser. That efficient
person coming along the road to tell the woman on the farm how to
arrange her work so that its burden may be lessened, would in one or two
European countries be a well-known figure in the farming community. She
would be welcomed and would take her place in the family for a time till
she had filled the minds of the members of that family circle with much
wisdom from her well-filled stores and had shown them by practical
demonstration the "why" and the "how" of many a new method of making
ends meet, of making long hours short, and of turning off work. After
supper she would be with the children for a time and let some light in
upon their puzzles; then when they had gone to bed she would talk every
difficulty over with the farm wife and the husband too; at least we may
be sure that she would do this if she were in this country, though
perhaps she would not in the Land of the Hausfrau; and being thoroughly
trained in gardening and in the treatment of all the animals that may
come under the care of the woman on the farm, whether pigs, lambs, bees,
or chickens, as well as in house sanitation, the care of the sick,
laundry-work, needle-work, embroidery and crochet, she can come very
near to the heart and the hands of her attentive hostess in the farm
home.

In this country the woman who is trained to perform this service will be
called a Farm Bureau Agent. According to a late letter from the
Secretary of Agriculture to his Crop Correspondents, it is the intention
of the Government to have in time such agents as these in every county
in the United States.

It is such a service as this that the so-called Smith-Lever Bill now
projected by the Federal Government would provide for--that is, if the
young women of the country will show that in their future homes they
would like to have a distinct advance upon the homes of the past. To
establish a faculty of trained women to go from home to home all over
this land, making