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a fair instance of the use of government to create and aggravate a problem.

Late in August, a delegation from the American Society of Agricultural Engineers told President Coolidge their solutions of the farm problem. Among other things it appears that the farmers are inefficient. Possibly we are. Efficiency is another modern deity among words. It frequently means the efficient transference of an inefficient product. Unquestionably, according to modern business, a group which spends all its time producing and none in advertising and selling is inefficient.

While the government spends millions to increase production, simultaneously with its expenditures for figuring how to dispose of the results of overproduction, manufacturers use the phrase 'farm aid' to decrease consumption. For instance, Henry Ford is quoted as saying that the dairy cow is inefficient, therefore he intends to produce milk synthetically and relieve the farmer of the drudgery of dairying. Assuming Mr. Ford to be serious and not advertising, it follows that farm aid approaches perfection in so far as it does away with farms and farmers.

Then the tractor is listed by its makers and sellers as farm aid. The words 'tractor,' 'lowering production costs,' 'farm aid,' linked together in advertising, cause a displacement of animal power. I owned a tractor for several years. To me it cannot compare in efficiency, cheapness, and even average speed with horses. A tractor cannot stand adversity as can a horse or mule. If your power is grain via draft animals and your products drop in price, your operating costs drop in the same ratio. Your overhead drops with your curtailed income. But if your power is a gas engine and the price of farm products drops, your power costs increase, for, after all, it is with an increased amount of farm products

that you buy gas, oil, and mechanics' services. To say that the converse is true, and that when prices of farm products rise your tractor takes less, disregards the fact that any comeback in food prices is followed at once by a vigorous and frequently successful demand for higher urban wages with their increased production costs to the farmer. Among other sales chatter used for tractors is that it is cruel to use horses. So we are led another step toward the goal established by Mr. Ford's anti-cow proposal. Another step toward perfect farm aid the elimination of need for farmers.

Yet, in our many-ringed farm-aid circus, one ring is devoted to the clamor that the abandonment of farms and the exodus of boys and girls cityward mean a decaying civilization. In this ring are thousands of people getting millions of dollars to keep the boy and girl on the farm. It might be well to observe that urban labor objects to no cost which will keep it free from competition. This, quoting Mr. Swett of San Francisco, is one reason for Australia's farm aid, which actually subsidizes the production of food.

There are many of us whose sole means of living is directly from the soil who believe that we ought not to be hampered by government reclamation schemes and resettlement projects. We believe that it is unjust and uneconomic to insist upon overproduction. We believe that those who proclaim that we are inefficient should risk their own capital and labor to drive us out. And we believe that the use of the Department of Agriculture to stimulate production and the Department of Labor to justify underproduction is unfair as well as uneconomic.

'Farm aid' and allied phrases are sacred. Their function is odd. Briefly, it is to create, aggravate, and perpetuate the evils they propose to overcome.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

THE WHISPERING HILLS

YEARS ago I was taught that 'very' is a very bad word to use; nevertheless I can find no better way of describing Amzi Miller than as a very good man. I discovered his rock-bottom worth one day when we slaved side by side to quench a woods fire, and again when he presented an insufficient bill for threshing our wheat and oats.

"That wheat,' he said, 'was so bad it would n't pay for threshing. Still, it would n't have been right to throw it out, and you not here to say yes or no. So I threshed her anyhow.

But the full measure of Amzi's virtue came home to me when I saw, on a subscription paper circulated to bring a resident pastor to our hamlet's sole church, the sum of fifty dollars opposite his signature. Now fifty dollars is probably a tenth of Amzi's total income, none of which comes in of its own accord. Moreover, Amzi is not a member of the church; and, being a bachelor, he has a relatively small stake in the godliness of the community.

When I congratulated him on his public spirit, he said: 'It's this way. I might not get fifty dollars' worth of good out of any preacher; but maybe my neighbors would. They're raising the children around here, and that's almighty expensive, so I thought I could go some stronger than they in raising this money.'

'In addition to which,' I replied, 'maybe you'll be needing a preacher some day to remedy your wifeless and childless condition.' Joking Amzi on the subject of his bachelorhood is one of the favorite local sports.

'I admit,' he replied with a grin, 'that baching it on a farm has drawbacks. backs. At the time most farmers

marry I had Ma to look out for. Later my brother and his wife lived with me. After they went to town I was too set in my ways to risk matrimony, even if a woman would have had me.'

"There's more than that to it, Amzi. A steady man like you, with a farm paid for, could find a wife in a week without ever setting foot outside this township.'

'Maybe so,' said he, but I'm choosey. And,' he added mysteriously, 'I got good reason to be.' With which my curiosity had to be satisfied, although it did not quite explain why the most dependable and, in a roughhewn, granitic, hard-bitted sort of way, the handsomest of my neighbors should stay unmarried in a region where marriage remains popular.

Some months later Amzi was helping me fill the ice house. While we were leveling the cakes and packing them in rows, with sawdust between, the other men would drive to the pond for another load; and as they had to go some distance we had plenty of time for conversation. Half an hour of work with pick and shovel and then fifteen minutes or so of loafing.

'I wish folks around here,' remarked Amzi, 'would quit marrying me off to this one or that. They talk about it, but they can't do it.'

'Perhaps they can, Amzi. Public opinion is mighty and may prevail.'

"They can't do it,' repeated Amzi, stubbornly. "They can't do it nohow. Because,' he added, 'I'm waiting for a certain party to make a move. But,

mind you, never mention that, or I'd never hear the last of it.'

'I'll promise,' I replied, 'if you'll tell me about her.'

Though itching to talk, he was characteristically cautious. 'Not her name; I won't tell you her name. But I will tell you the circumstances, short and brief.

'My father was a great hand for moving from one farm to another. Before I was twenty I'd lived on a dozen farms. Then we moved on to the place that lies just under the Whispering Hills. You know the look of them from the road-just three small rounded hills, too steep for the plough, but carrying plenty grass for sheep. They're called the Whispering Hills because of the echoes. Whisper in certain places and the sound will carry to other places clean out of sight. There was some ploughland, but not much, because the sand plains begin right there at the hills.

'One rough night in March-after a sunny day the wind had come sudden, bringing snow flurries- I was up and around the hills well after dark to see that the ewes and lambs were all in shelter. When I was striking out for home I thought I heard above the wind someone sighing and moaning. The sound seemed right at my feet, but the ground was clear all round as far as I could see by lantern light. So I shouted, "I'm a-coming," and started to search. Maybe you've guessed it was a girl. You're right. She was lying in a gully, with the snow eddying and dancing round her. It seems she'd been thrown while riding through the sand plains about sundown; the city folks did a good deal of horseback riding out that way, because fences are so few there. Once down, she made for the road and, night coming on, headed for our lights. But her ankle had twisted and the going was plenty rough, so she had

fainted from pain more than once on the way.

'I carried her home like she was a child, and Ma tucked her in our best bed, with hot towels around the ankle and hot sage tea inside her. Ma's first thought in trouble was always hot sage tea. Then I hitched up and drove three miles to a telephone to tell her folks she was safe. They came out in the morning, bringing a doctor. All the time I was on the road I could n't seem to think of anything else but that I had carried her in my arms a right long spell, and I was mighty proud of the strength that let me do it.

"That summer she rode over our way pretty often. When she came it was like Heaven opening and an angel dropping through. Her name was Marjorie, and she seemed to get real enjoyment by sending me to the right places to whisper "Marjorie, Marjorie," while she stood like a statue agin' the sky, listening. She tried whispering "Amzi," too, but that name ain't exactly made for whispering. Sometimes she'd bring a fiddle and play little tunes; the echoes did strange things to them. And other times we'd just set there, she making conversation and I watching her and the sheep.

'Winters she'd be away at school or college, but every summer she'd ride over now and then. Often talked to me about education, and how I ought to be going to agricultural school; but I thought not, Pa being restless and me having Ma on my mind. One summer Marjorie did n't come at all, but crossed the ocean to study music. When she finally showed up, she told me she was going to be married.

""Well," I says to her, "it's a risk any way you look at it. I used to think maybe we could be married some day; but I see it's not to be, and rightly so, we being so different circumstanced and all. But there's no harm in my

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"That's about all. She got a good man, worth quite a bit of money, and between them they've raised a family that's most grown up now. I see the young'uns' pictures in the paper one time or another. Last year she got her husband to buy the old farmhouse at Whispering Hills for a summer place; and after they've 'sperimented with the trash help you find in the country nowadays I expect they'll be after me to work it for them. So you can set it down that Amzi Miller ain't taking no wife just yet, nor otherwise loading himself down so that he can't make a quick jump. I would n't ask nothing better than to labor for that woman till I drop, even though hers is the worst farm, for farming purposes, in the country.'

A PRIMARY QUESTION

I LIVE in the tropics. Every day, above my head, passes the vertical sun of the equatorial regions. Throughout the year there extends an unbroken heat; day after day I wear the same white clothing, proved by experience to be the coolest clothing a man can wear and keep within the conventions. In April, when the sun goes north to the Tropic of Cancer, and in the fall, when he returns south to cross the equator, we have our hottest seasons, two of them; but these are merely

intensifications of the always-present. The rains bring comparative coolness, but we still wear white and sweat (not perspire) at the slightest physical exertion. Along the water front, where the ships come to load sugar and hemp and copra and kapok and our other tropical raw materials, the glare of the sun is terrific. Some sort of protection for the eyes is a necessity - Crookes's glasses, or colored glasses of some description. A friend of mine whose work keeps him there most of the day and who neglected this precaution has only just managed to save his sight at much trouble and expense.

The effect of exposure to the unremitting daily glare of the tropic sun is jagged nerves. By the end of the day they are worn and frayed, and men do queer things. Even the natives, with their pigment protection against the excessive light, do queer things. This is the land where men run amuck, slaying right and left all living things that come in their way until they themselves are stopped by death. This is the land of the siesta, where not only 'foreigners' like myself but also the natives sleep through the midday hours, and the darkness of night comes as a welcome relief. How the natives love to sit hour on hour and talk in the moonlight, so cool after the heat of the day!

These general conditions of excessive heat and light are characteristic of the tropics. We learned this in school, of course, and no one needs to be told. But we also learned some things about colors that, in my experience, I do not find to be true. Did we not learn, were we not taught, that the inhabitants of tropical countries love gaudy colors, reds, yellows, and greens, and that red is a color peculiarly irritant to the nerves? For example, if we wish to make two people quarrel, we have only to put them together in a red room and

the desired result will surely follow, for the red color will irritate them beyond restraint. Does not red make the bull in the field chase us out of it? And does not red affect the appetites and passions, raising them to a high pitch of excitement?

But here my experience is just the reverse. I have noticed with surprise that, when my self-control is worn thin by the excessive light to which I am exposed, there is nothing so soothing, so restorative of calm and wholesomeness, as to be able to gaze awhile at a square of red cloth hung on the wall near by. And this red is no pale, incipient shade. It is the red of the red hibiscus that grows in the tropics; the red of the canna lily known as the Spanish flag; the pulsating red of that most gorgeous of all flowers, the double poinsettia; the strong, the primary color. It draws my spirit together, which has increasingly felt ready to fly asunder like a bursting shell, tearing those about me in bursts of temper as the fragments of a bursting shell would tear the flesh of their bodies. But the glorious red of that piece of cloth eases the strain as I gaze at it: the bursting pressure relaxes; the outer casing of my self-control is as it were - kept whole. I have found it a wholesome color; it brings relief without reaction.

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the explanation to be that it was because they were nearer the primitive than we, nearer the child state of the human race; that this was a mark of the savage. For the love of bright colors is usually taken to indicate an undeveloped taste, a discrimination not yet grown nice. But I have come to doubt the truth of this dictum. I have come to suspect that there are deep and fundamental principles behind this love of bright colors so characteristic of the characteristic of the sunny lands.

Red seems to be the predominating color of the tropics. And man, in his propensity for red, is only responding to a rule laid down by nature. There are flowers here in flaming red that are red nowhere else. The hibiscus is one. We have trees, full-grown trees as high as a two-story house, which, in the proper season, are covered with flowers of an intense red. Perhaps in other tropical countries the exuberant growth of plant life has produced trees with flowers of other colors, but here there are none, so far as I know. Except some shrubs with pale yellow flowers, there are none but red.

Now the point is this: if you travel northward, into the high latitudes of the temperate zone, you will find the prevailing color among the wild flowers to be no longer red, but blue. Even before I came to the tropics I had noticed this predominance of blue among the wild flowers of north China. There were flowers of other colors, of course. The wild chrysanthemums I picked on my walks among the rocky China hills were yellow; the wild azaleas were a lovely pink. But, down among the grasses were myriads of small, inconspicuous flowers tinged with blue, like forget-me-nots. And, as if to emphasize them, the blue gentians bloomed in profusion. As one walked through the grassy plains, it often seemed as if he walked in fields

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