A few other inquiries for power systems came in, but their motives were more purely economic. The labor problem was becoming more baffling every year; hired men were expensive, and they wouldn’t stay. The water power, once installed, would cost nothing; it would work all day and all year until the bed of the stream was worn level. Billy knew that once started the fever was bound to spread, and he had visions.
When his car climbed the hills at sunrise, as it often did now that the work was pressing, with school fairs and marketing associations busy disposing of the year’s harvests, he frequently saw a round-shouldered, blue-overalled boy, half awake, plodding out to the barn. He remembered well the sleepy stupidness, the torturing ache of the body weakened by the fever of growth, and stiffened by long hours of a man’s work. Some day, he believed, every farm in the district would have mechanical power doing the heartbreaking drudgery which was making boys shiver at the thought of farming all their lives. Occasionally
a woman coming from the barn with her milk-pails and a fretful little toddler or two tagging along after her would startle him with a crowd of memories which he had been trying hard to forget. Whatever changes might come now, he would always have to remember that until he was old enough to do it himself, nothing had been done to make things easier for his mother. In the evenings when he drove home late and saw families still struggling with belated chores, he had a dream of a time when every farm would have regular hours, when the family would gather in the evenings not too tired to enjoy each other, when the mothers of the farms, famed in all history for giving the world its sturdiest, brainiest children, would have time to give their best to all their children, to put their best work on the black sheep, or misfits, or handicapped, or delicate ones, for whom there is little special provision in the country outside their own homes.
A speaker at a political meeting in the town hall had recently expressed something of the same ideas. “There is a movement for better things among the farmers’ wives,” he said. “The idea is finding recognition among them that all the prizes of progress are no longer to be allowed to go to the man-life on the farm while the woman-life is left to vegetate. The woman on the farm must bear the oncoming hosts of strong
men, or they will not be borne. And unless the farm women can live under conditions which make for happiness, health and pride our whole nation will be weakened by ill-health, unhappiness, and unrest of the mothers and wives.”
A few of the more adventurous women had accompanied their husbands to hear the speaker, but they gave little sign of their approval or disapproval of his sentiments. A week or two later Mrs. Burns called at the agricultural office to see if the Representative would have time, with all the community water-power demands, to help do something for the children. Billy hoped he would have time. Recollections of certain experiences of his own childhood on the Swamp Farm had left his sympathies quick for any youngster suffering possibly some of the same tribulations. Yet he knew the homes in the neighborhood pretty well, and he knew that child-labor could not be called an evil of the section, except in the backward crevices of the hills, and in the best counties of the province there are “way-back” places where a lot of evils go unmolested. Even on one of the leading farms near the town, where the children of the family were perhaps over cared for, there was a “Home-boy,” stolid, stunted, stupid-looking, who couldn’t talk plain, and who went around with his mouth open and a painful, bitter look about his eyes. Billy had misgivings as to how things
were going with him. He felt ready to support any movement which Mrs. Burns might have in mind.
“You remember hearing that political speaker say that the woman on the farm gave the world its sturdiest children?” she began. “Well, after what I had seen in hospital work, and what I’ve seen right around home, I wondered. Last week we had a doctor talk to us at the Women’s Institute, and he showed us that the tradition that children brought up in the country are healthier than children brought up in the city is all a lie. He showed us that while the death rate in the cities has been going down steadily for the last ten years, in the country it maintains a pretty straight line. The beginning of most of it starts with the children. In the country we don’t go to doctors or dentists or oculists until the case gets desperate; it’s a good deal of trouble to go, and often the cost has to be considered. Most people have never been taught that “little” things like enlarged tonsils or bad teeth can become very serious.
“I was in a house the other day when one of the girls came home from school crying with a toothache. She had been suffering for weeks, but they said it was only a first tooth; it would soon come out itself. She had never gone to a dentist in her life, and her front teeth were so crooked as to be a disfigurement. If something
isn’t done soon she will have to go through her whole life disfigured. It isn’t fair.