afterthought.  The children are contributors to the family support from the time they can toddle and schooling comes a bad second in making the family arrangements.  One reason for this growing evil is the threatening degradation and disappearance of the independent farmer class, who made up what would have been called in England formerly the yeomanry of this country, and their replacement by a poor peasantry degraded by the wretched terms upon which they are driven to snatch a bare existence from a patch of land to which they are tied by lease, by mortgage or by wages, and which they have neither the money nor the knowledge to cultivate to advantage.

The Federal Commission on Industrial Relations has brought to light some startling facts in this phase of our social life, as in many others.  I can refer to the evidence of but one witness.  She speaks for many thousands.  This is as it is quoted in the daily press.

Picture for the moment the drama staged at Dallas.  Mrs. I. Borden Harriman of New York is presiding over the commission.  Mrs. Levi Stewart, the wife of a tenant farmer, is on the witness stand.  Mrs. Stewart is a shrinking little woman with “faded eyes and broken body.”  She wears a blue sunbonnet.  Her dress of checkered material has lost its color from long use.  In a thin, nervous voice she answers the questions of the distinguished leader of two kinds of “society.”

  “Do you work in the fields?” Mrs. Harriman began.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How old were you when you married?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “How old was your husband?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Did you work in the fields when you were a child?”

  “Oh, yes’m, I picked and I chopped.”

  “Have you worked in the fields every year?”

  “I do in pickin’ and choppin’ times.”

  “And you do the housework?’

  “There ain’t no one else to do it.”

  “And the sewing?”

  “Yes, ma’am.  I make all the clothes for the children
  and myself.  I make everything I wear ever since I was
  married.”

  “Do you make your hats?”

  “Yes, ma’am.  I make my hats.  I had only two since I
  was married.”

  “And how long have you been married?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “Do you do the milking?”

  “Most always when we can afford a cow.”

  “What time do you get up in the morning?”

  “I usually gits up in time to have breakfast done by 4
  o’clock in summer time.  In the winter time we are through
  with breakfast by sun-up.”

  “Did you work in the fields while you were carrying your
  children?”

  “Oh, yes, sometimes; sometimes almost nigh to birthin’
  time.”

  “Is this customary among the tenant farmers’ wives you
  have known?”

  The answer was an affirmative nod.