of as they arise, regardless of what plans the rustic swain cherishes for the use of his spare time.  Urban laborers have contrived by one means or another to bring about a limitation of the number of hours per diem they are forced to toil.  To the farmers such an alleviation of their hardships is not within the realm of practicability.  They kick about it of course.  They say it’s a blooming nuisance.  But neither their heartburnings nor their struggles can efface it as a fact.

Again, the means of entertainment are more limited, and that by a big lot, with the farmer than with those who dwell in the cities.  It is all very well to talk about the blessings of the rural telephone, rural free delivery, and the automobile.  These things do make communication easier than it used to be, but after all they’re only a drop in the bucket and do little to stop the drift cityward.  We may remark just here that if you live a thousand miles from nowhere and are willing to drive your Tin Lizzie into town for “the advantages,” you aren’t likely to get much even along the line of the movies, and you’ll get less still if what you’re after is an A-1 school for your progeny.

Finally, the widespread impression that the farmer is a bloated and unscrupulous profiteer has done much to disgust him with his station and employment in life.  We don’t say he’s the one and only when it comes to the virtues.  Maybe he hasn’t sprouted any wings yet.  What if he hasn’t?  The cities, with their brothels, their big business, and their municipal governments—­you wouldn’t have the face to say that there’s anything wrong with them, now would you?  Oh, no!  Of course not!  The farmer pays high for his machinery and goes clear to the bottom of his pocketbook when he has to buy shoes or a sack of flour, but let him have a steer’s hide or a wagon load of wheat to sell, and it’s somebody else’s ox that’s gored.  Consumers pay big prices for farm products, goodness knows, but they don’t pay them to the farmer.  Not on your tintype.  The middleman gets his, you needn’t question that.  We beg pardon a thousand times.  We mean the middle_men_.  There’s no end to those human parasites.

And so farmer after farmer breaks up the old homestead and contributes his mite to the drift cityward.  What will be the result that comes out of it all?  The effect upon the farmer deserves an editorial all to itself.  Here we must limit ourselves to the effects on the future of our beloved American nation.  And even these we can now do no more than mention; we lack space to elaborate them.  One effect, if the tendency continues, will be such a reduction in home-produced foodstuffs that we shall have to import from other countries lying abroad a good portion of the means of our physical sustenance, and shall face such an increase in the cost of the same that thousands and thousands of our people will find it increasingly harder as the years pass by to maintain their relative economic position.  Another effect