In the new industrialism that has invited the
daughters of the Polish women harvesters into the factories yonder there
is this constant and increasing concern which is insisting upon a living
wage, wholesome sanitary environment, and on shorter hours of labor for
women and children--this purpose that will ultimately bring skies and
sunsets without exposure or back-breaking labor.
On my way to a provincial university in the north of France not long ago,
I saw a peasant mother standing in the misty morning at the mouth of a
small thresher, feeding into it the sheaves handed her by her husband, the
horse in a treadmill furnishing the power. When I passed in the misty
morning of the next day she was still feeding the yellow sheaves into the
thresher; and I thought how much better that was than the flail.
On a farm in the northwest, a hundred miles square, as long ago as 1893,
three hundred self-binders were reaping the wheat at the cost of less than
a cent a bushel--with practically no human labor beyond driving,
[Footnote: H.
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