as a boy on a little yankee farm i had a “stent” set out for me every day. during the winter it was sawing and splitting wood. our barn stood so that somehow on a winter’s day one side of it faced the road, and it always seemed to be warm and sunny. the other was turned so it was always cold and frosty, with little if any sun. the hens, the cow and the sheep always made for the sunny side of the barn, which represented the comfortable and the bright side of life. the old gentleman who brought me up always put the woodpile on the frosty side of the barn. he argued that if the boy worked too much on the sunny side, he would stop to look at the passers-by, feel something of the joy of living, and stop his work to absorb a little of it. we were brought up to believe that labor was a curse, put upon us for our sins, a serious matter, a discipline and never a joy. when the boy worked on the frosty side, he must move fast in order to keep warm. he would not stop to loaf in the sun, he could not throw stones or practise baseball so long as he had to keep his mittens on to keep his fingers warm. thus the argument was that the boy would accomplish more on the frosty side, and realize that labor represented the primal curse which somehow seemed to rest particularly hard upon the farmer. and so as a child i did my work and passed much of my life on the frosty side of the barn, silent and thoughtful, while the hens cackled and sang on the sunny side. it seemed strange to me that people could not see that the thing which made the hens lay would surely make the boy work.
there will always be a dispute as to whether a boy or a man does his best work under the spur of necessity, or out of a full bag of the oats of life. and they do it with greater or less cruelty as more or less of their life has been spent on the frosty side. i never yet saw a self-made man who did anything like a perfect job on himself. they usually spoil their own sons by giving them too easy a time, while work is a necessity in building character. work without play of some sort is labor without soul, and that is one of the most cruel and dangerous things in the world. i have noticed that most men who pass their childhood on the frosty side of the barn have what i call a squint-eyed view of youth. they spend a large part of their time telling how they had to work as a boy, and how much inferior their own sons are since they do not have chores to do. that man’s boys will pay no attention except when his eye is upon them, and rightly so, i think. the man looks across the table at mother, with a shake of his head, for is not the smith family responsible for the fact that these boys do not equal their wonderful sire? i have learned better than to expect much sympathy from my boys for what happened 50 years ago.
the old gentleman would come now and then and look around the corner of the barn to see if i was at work. the frosty side of the barn in youth has one advantage. it forces the boy to think and reason out the justice of life. uncle daniel had not read enough of history to know that guizot, the great french historian, says that the only thing which those who represent tyranny, injustice or evil are afraid of is the human mind. what he means is that whenever you can get the plain, common people to think clearly and with their own brains, they will sooner or later wipe off the slate of history and write freedom in big letters. on the sunny side i think i should have talked and so rid myself of my thought before it could print itself upon my little brain, but there on the frosty side of the barn i know that i said little, but reasoned it out with the clear wisdom of childhood. if uncle daniel had been a student of shakespeare, he would have gone straight to that famous passage in julius cæsar which probably expresses the thought of 90 per cent of the humans capable of thinking, who have ever lived to maturity:
“let me have men about me that are fat,
sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights;
yond’ cassius has a lean and hungry look;
he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”
i was thinking out my problem, and i want to tell you younger men that the questions which started at the teeth of my saw on the frosty side of that old barn have cut their way through the years, and chased and haunted me all through life. the injustice of labor and social conditions—that is the foundation of the trouble in the world. upon it all helpful education should be based. youth’s ideals will always chase you like that, if you give them half a chance, and you never can have better mental companions. i was trying to reason out one of two resolutions. off in that dim future of manhood when i should grow up, my time would come, and i might have power over some other boy, or maybe a man. i could put him on the frosty or on the sunny side of the barn, as i saw fit. what would i do to him to pay for my session on the frosty side? somehow i think it is natural for human beings to seek reparation and promise themselves to take their misfortunes out of someone else when their power comes. i think i should have grown up with something of that determination in mind had it not been for the poet longfellow.
now you will smile, you successful farmers, you dry old analyzers and solemn teachers and you budding young hopes. what has poetry to do with farming or agricultural education? what did the poet longfellow ever do for farming? did he ever have a hen in an egg-laying contest that laid 300 eggs in a year? did he ever raise a prize pumpkin, or a prize crop of potatoes? did he even originate the longfellow variety of flint corn? do not men need solid pith rather than flabby poetry in their thought? it is true that longfellow would have starved to death on a good farm. yet his poetry and the thought that went with it were one of the things that made new england dominate this country in thought. my childhood was passed at a time when we had no science to study. bacteria were swimming all about us in the air, the food and the water. i had, no doubt, swallowed millions of them at every mouthful, and we grew fat on them. we had no books on science or bulletins, but every farmhouse had its copy of bryant, whittier, longfellow, emerson and holmes. the best duck-raiser in our town was a man who could recite bryant’s poem, “to a water fowl,” with his eyes shut. i think i could safely challenge many famous poultrymen to recite even one verse of that poem, yet who would say that he would not be a better poultryman and a better man if he could carry in his heart a few verses of that poem?
“there is a power whose care
teaches thy way along that pathless coast.”
...
“he who from zone to zone,
guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
in the long way which i must tread alone,
will lead my steps aright.”
i had recited longfellow’s “resignation” in school. i gave it about as a parrot would, but on the frosty side of the old barn one verse shoved itself into my little brain:
“let us be patient;
these severe afflictions
not from the ground arise;
but oftentimes celestial benedictions
assume this dark disguise.”
just think of that, a “celestial benediction”—it was a great thing for a boy to think about. i looked both words up in the dictionary and got, perhaps, half of their meaning. in all our town there seemed to be no one except our old minister to come around on the frosty side of the barn with comfort or promise, but this celestial benediction which the poet told about got right to you. it might even live under that awful pile of wood which i was to saw, and it would be worth the job of sawing it if i could find such a thing under the pile. i heard people speak of a “nigger in the woodpile” in terms of reproach, but a celestial benediction down under the wood was certainly entitled to all respect. i did not fully understand it, or what it meant, but it got into me and stayed there, where the multiplication table or the rule of square root never would remain. my belief is that if i had committed to memory in place of that poem some excellent classroom lecture at college i should have become a little anarchist, and gone through life pushing such people as i could reach toward the frosty side of the barn. as it was, that poem, repeated over and over, made me vow as a child that if i ever could influence or direct the lives of farmers i would do my best to see that they lived and did their work on the sunny side of the barn.
in my day children were brought up on “the scriptures and a stick,” both well applied, and yet all these “lectures and lickings” never stuck in my life as did the noble poetry we read in school, and the few pictures which hung on the walls of the home. there is a curious thing about some of these pictures. i am told of a case where two boys in the tennessee mountains volunteered for the navy. their mountain home was as far removed from the ocean as it well could be. they had never seen even a large pond. for three generations not one of their ancestors had ever seen the salt water. yet these boys would not listen to any call for the army, but they demanded a place in the navy. the story came to an officer in a nearby camp, and he became interested and visited that home. both father and mother were puzzled over the action of their boys, and they could not understand why henry and william had demanded the ocean. as the officer turned away he noticed hanging on the wall in the living-room of that house the crude picture of a ship under full sail and on an impossible blue ocean. it had come into that family years before, wrapped around a package of goods, and mother had hung it on the wall. from their youth those boys had grown up with that picture before them, and it had decided their lives. it was stronger than the influence of father and mother—they could not overcome it. i speak of that in order that you men and women with children of your own may understand how the dreams, the poetry, the visions of youth may prove stronger influences than any of the science, the wisdom, or the fine examples you may put before your little ones.
on the wall of our old living-room at home was a chromo entitled “joseph and his brethren.” it was an awful work of art. it showed a group of men putting a boy down into a hole in the ground. it would have made the head of an art department weep in misery, and yet it affected me deeply. i used to stand and study it, with the result that at least one chapter of the bible gave me great joy, and that was the story of joseph and his brothers. that story helped to keep me sweet and hopeful on the frosty side of the barn, for i reasoned it all out as i worked. here, i thought, was a farm boy. he did rather more than his share of living on the frosty side, and see what he came to. i used to picture joseph in mind as he came walking over the desert carrying his father’s instructions about the sheep and the management of the farm. his brothers saw him coming, and they said among themselves, “behold, this dreamer cometh.” you see, even in those days, practical men could not understand the value of a dreamer, a poet or a thinker as the first aid to practical agriculture. i have no doubt that joseph the dreamer often forgot to water the sheep. i have no doubt but that they got away from him when he was herding them, and so his brothers quickly got rid of him, and they sent him off to the place where they thought dreams never came true. and that is where they made their mistake, and the same mistake is often made in these days by other practical farmers, for dreams that are based on faith and pure ambition always come true. if joseph had not been a dreamer, carrying the ideals of his childhood into egypt, we can readily understand which side of the barn his brothers would have gone to when they appeared before him later. but joseph was a man who remembered the dreams and the hopes of his childhood kindly; he gave those brothers the sunniest side of the barn, and by doing so he made himself one of the great men in history.
you may surely take it from me that at some time in your life, if you prove worth the salt you have eaten, your state or your country will call you up before the judgment seat, and will say to you:
“i demand your life. in your youth you had ideals of manhood and of service. i have trained you and given you knowledge. i now demand your life as proof that your old ideals were true.”
that comes to all men not only on the battlefield, but in all the humble walks of life—the farm, the factory, the shop, wherever men are put at labor, and it means a life given to service, the use of power and knowledge, in order that men less fortunate may live on the sunny side of the barn.
we had something of an illustration of this when america entered the great war. many of us felt honestly that our boys were not quite up to the standard. we thought they were a little lazy, inefficient or spoiled, because they did not think as we did about labor and the necessity for work. we did not realize what the trouble was, and so we generally charged it to the influence of mother’s side of the family. we could not understand that by education, training and example, we had simply taught those boys only the material and selfish side of life. they demanded unconsciously more of its poetry and romance and thus the war swept them away in a blaze of glory. we suddenly woke up to find that under the inspiration of an unselfish desire, our lazy and careless boys had become the finest soldiers this world has ever seen. they were made so through the power of poetry and imagination, for “making the world safe for democracy” is only another name for making the great life offering in order that helpless men and women may know the comfort and glory of living on the “sunny side of the barn.”
i think i have lived long enough and under conditions which fit me to know human nature better than most men know books. our present improved man came from a savage. originally man was a confirmed dweller on the frosty side of the barn. as human life has developed, the tendency has been for this man to run for a warm place on the sunny side. in order to get there, his natural tendency has been to crowd some weaker brother back into the frost. we may not like to admit it, but as we have crowded poetry and imagination and love out of agricultural education, we have lost track of the thought that there is one great duty we owe to society for the great educational machine she has given us. that one great life duty is to try to carry some more unfortunate brother out of the frost into the comfort of the sunny side of the barn. we are too much in the habit of trying to leave this practical betterment to the legislature or to the federal government, when it never can be done unless we do it ourselves, as a part of human sacrifice. you must remember that in spite of all our scientific work, the world is still largely fed and clothed by the plain farmers, whose stock in trade is largely human nature and instinct. the shadow which undoubtedly lies over farming today is due to the fact that too many of these men and women feel that they are booked hopelessly to spend their lives on the frosty side of the barn.
it is in large part a mental trouble, a feeling of deep resentment, such as in a very much smaller way came to me as a little boy, for you will see how real and true are the ideals of childhood. the great aim of all education should be to find some way of putting poetry and imagination into the hearts of the men and women who are now on the frosty side of the barn. there is more in this than any mere increase of food production, or increase of land values. a great industrial revolution is facing this nation. such things have come before again and again. they were always threatening, and every time they appeared strong men and women feared for the future of their country. yet in times past these dark storms have always broken themselves against a solid wall of contented and prosperous freeholders. they always disappear and turn into a gentle, reviving rain when they strike the sunny side of the barn. that is where the errors and mistakes of society are taken apart and remade, better than ever before, by skilled and happy workmen. it is on the frosty side of the barn, in the unhappy shadows, where men tear down and destroy without attempting to rebuild, for there can be no human progress except that which is finally built upon contentment and faith. men and women must be brought to the sunny side of the barn if this nation is to remain the land of opportunity, and such men and women as we have here must do the work.
if you ask me how this is to be done, i can only go back to childhood once more for an illustration. i know all the characters of the following little drama. we will call the children john, mary and bert. john and mary were relatives of the old gentleman who owned the farm, and they came for a long visit. bert was the farm boy, put out to work on that farm for his board and clothes, one of the thousands of war orphans who represented a great legacy which the civil war had left to this country. john and mary were bright and petted and pampered. you know how such smart city children can usually outshine and outbluff a farm boy. the woman of the house, a thrifty new england soul, decided that this was her chance to get the woodshed filled with dry wood, and so she put the three children at it. before bert knew what was going on, those city children had it all “organized.” bert was to work on the frosty side of the barn where the woodpile was, and he was to saw and split all the wood. john played until bert had split an armful, then john carried it about two rods to the shed, where mary took it out of his arms and piled it inside. i have lived some years since that time, and i have seen many enterprises come and go, and if that arrangement is not typical of thousands of cases which show the relation between the farmer and middleman and handler, i have simply lived and observed in vain, and bert represented the farmer.
and the distribution of the rewards received in exchange for that combination was still more typical. now and then the woman would think the woodshed was not filling very fast, so that some form of bribery to labor was necessary. she would then come out with half a pie, or a few cookies, to stimulate the work. strange to say, the distribution of this prize was always given to the girl. she was doing that absolutely useless work of piling the wood, and yet the pie and the cookies were handed to her for distribution. for a great many centuries, it must be said that the farmer never had much of a chance with the town man when it came to receiving favors from the ladies, and in the distribution of that pie john and mary usually ate about seven-eighths of it, and handed the balance to bert, for even then those city children had formed the idea that a silent, unresisting farm boy was made to be the beast of burden, fit for the frosty side of the barn.
and just as happens in other and larger forms of business, there were, in that toy performance of a great drama, forms of legislative bribery for middlemen and farmers. those children were told that if they would hurry and get the woodshed filled up, they would receive pleasure and a present. john and mary, as middlemen, might go to the circus, while the boy on the saw would receive a fine present. this would be a book which told how a splendid little boy sawed 15 cords of wood in two weeks, and then asked his mother if he couldn’t please go down the road and saw five cords more for a poor widow woman during his play time. ever since the world began, that seems to have been the idea of agricultural legislation. the real direct pleasure and profit have gone to john and mary, while to bert has gone the promise of an education which will teach him how to work a little harder. looking back over the world’s history, the most astonishing thing to me is that society has failed to see that the best investment of public money and power is that made closest up to the ground, the great mother of us all. other interests have received it, largely because they have been able to organize and make a stronger appeal to the imagination.
of course in every drama of human life there has to be a crisis where the actors come to blows, and it happened so in this case. there came one day particularly cold, and with a special run of hard and knotty wood to be sawed. that gave john and mary more time for play, and put an extra job on bert. i cannot tell just how the battle started; it may have been caused by mary, for a thousand times in the history of the world the relations between two boys and a girl have upset all calculations and changed the course of history. or it may be that the spirit of injustice boiled up in the heart of that boy on the saw, and swept away his peaceful disposition. at any rate, when john found fault because he did not work faster, bert dropped his saw and tackled the tormentor. if i am to tell the truth, i am forced to admit that there was no science at all about the battle which that boy put up for the rights of farm labor. he should, i suppose, have imitated some of the old heroes described by homer and virgil, but as the rage of battle came over him, the most effective fighter he could think of was the old ram, and i regret to say that he lowered his head, and, without regard for science, butted john in the stomach and knocked him down. then he sat on his enemy, took hold of his hair with both hands, and proceeded to pound his head on the frosty ground, while mary danced about, not caring to interfere, but evidently waiting to bestow her favors upon the victor. and just as john was getting ready to call “enough” the kitchen door opened and out came the woman of the house with the old minister.
she certainly looked like a very stern picture of justice as she peered over her spectacles at the boys on the ground, and the three children were arraigned before her. “what shall i do with these children? i shall never get this job done. i have spent nearly five pies on these children already, and see how little they have piled, and here they are fighting over it. i think the best thing i can do is to whip that lazy boy at the saw.”
i wish you could have seen the face of the old minister as he rolled up his wrinkles and prepared to answer. it was worth a good deal to see how he looked out of the corner of his eye at the boy on the saw.
“my good friend,” said he, “this is not a case for prayer or for punishment, or for investigation, or for education. it is a case for an adjustment of labor and pie. that boy on the saw has been doing practically all of the work, and getting almost nothing of the reward. he is discouraged, and i don’t blame him. you cannot crowd more work out of him with a stick. move him out into the sun, give him the pie, and let him eat his share and distribute the rest. make the other boy split and carry and pile all that wood, and put that girl at washing windows. the closer you put the pie up to the sawbuck, the more wood you will have cut.”
now tell me, you scientists and you wise men, if that does not tell the whole story. it is the pie of life, or the fair distribution of that pie, which leads men and women to the sunny side of the barn. what we need most of all in this country is some power like that of the old minister, who can drive that thought home to human society, and it will not be driven home until our leaders and our teachers have in their hearts more of the poetry and the imagination which lead men and women to attempt the impossible and work it out. you will not agree with me when i say that in a majority of the farm homes today there is greater need of the gentle, humanizing influence of poetry and vision than of the harder and sterner influence of science and sharp business practice. as the years go on you will come to see that i am right.
i know that is one of the hardest things on earth for some of us to understand, for modern education has led us away from the thought. in our grasp for knowledge we have tried to substitute science entirely for sentiment, forgetting that the really essential things of life cannot stand close analysis, because they are held together by faith. in reaching out after power we have tried too hard to imitate the shrewd scheming of the politician and the big interests. we have failed thus far because we have neglected too many of our natural weapons. over 200 years ago andrew fletcher wrote:
“i knew a very wise man who believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.”
andrew fletcher’s wise man knew what he was talking about. very likely some of you older people can remember the famous hutchinson family in the days before the civil war. i have seen the new hampshire farmhouse where they were raised. it was just a group of plain farmers who traveled about the country singing simple little songs about freedom. that plain farm family did more to make the american people see the sin of slavery than all the statesmen new england could muster or all the laws she could make. there was little science and less art about their singing, but it was in the language of the common people and they understood it.
“the ox bit his master;
how came that to pass?
the ox heard his master say
‘all flesh is grass!’”
there came a crisis in the civil war when soldier and statesman stood still wondering what to do next, for they were powerless without the spirit of the people. then william cullen bryant wrote the great song in which he poured out the burning thought of the people:
“we’re coming, father abraham,
three hundred thousand more,
from mississippi’s winding stream
and from new england’s shore.
we leave our plows and workshops,
our wives and children dear,
with hearts too full for utterance,
but with a silent tear.
“we’re coming, we’re coming, the union to restore;
we’re coming, father abraham, three hundred thousand more!”
had it not been for such songs and the spirit they aroused the civil war never could have been won. we now understand that during the great war the french army was at the point of mutiny, and was saved not by stern discipline but by a renewal of its spiritual power. i think it will be as hard as for a man to try and lift himself by his boot straps to try to put farming into its proper place through science and material prosperity alone. we need poets to give us songs and playwrights to put our story in such pictures that the world must listen to it and understand. the one great thing which impels us to work on and fight is the hope that the property which we may leave behind us will be safe and put to reasonable use. some of us may leave cash and lands; others can give the world only a family of children, but at heart our struggle is to see that this heritage may be made safe.
for most of us make a great mistake in locating a storage place for the heritage which we hope to leave to the future. we work and we toil; we struggle to improve conditions; we strive to capitalize our worry and our work into money and into land in order that our children may carry on our work. have you ever stopped to think who holds the future of all this? many of you no doubt will say that the future of this great nation lies in the banks and vaults of the cities where money is piled up mountains high. we have all acted upon that principle too long, digging wealth from the soil and then sending it into the town for investment, until we have come to think that our future lies there. we are wrong; it is a mistake. the future of this land, and all it means to us, lies in the hands of little children, who are playing on the city streets or in the open fields of the country, and it is not so much in their hands as in the pictures which are being printed on their little minds and souls. and this future will be safer with poetry and imagination than with the multiplication table alone.
i know about this from my own start in life. i was expected to be satisfied with work until i was 21, and then have a suit of clothes and a yoke of oxen. one trouble with the farmers of new england was that they thought this a sufficient outfit for their boys. i think i might have fallen in with that plan and contented my life with it had it not been for a crude picture which hung in the shop where we pegged shoes. it was a poor color scheme, a perfect daub of art, in which some amateur artist had tried to express a thought which was too large for his soul. a bare oak tree, with most of its branches gone, was framed against the winter sky. it was evening; a few stars had appeared, and the sky was full of color. the artist had tried to arrange the stars and the sky colors so that they represented a crude american flag, with the oak tree serving as the staff. his great unexpressed thought was that at the close of the civil war god had painted his promise of freedom on the sky in the coloring of that flag. as a child, that crude picture became a part of my life. i have never been able to forget the glory of it, as i have forgotten the meanness, the poverty, the narrow blindness of our daily lives, so that all through the long and stormy years, wherever i have walked, i have seen that flag upon the sky, and i have waited hopefully for the coming of the sunrise of that day when, through the work of real education, when with the help of such men and such women as are here today, every hopeless man, every lonely woman, every melancholy child upon a sad and desolate hill farm, may feel the thrill of opportunity, and the joy and the glory of living upon the sunny side of the barn.
