“It is all that,” answered Ed. “What about it?”
“Why, he says that in Missouri the eggs and spring chickens produced by what he calls ‘the great American hen’ sell every year for more money than all the corn, wheat, oats, and hay raised in the state, twice over. And he gives the figures for it too.”
“That is surprising,” said Ed, “but it is very probably true. The trouble is that we have no trustworthy statistics on the subject. No ordinary farmer keeps any account of his crops of that kind. Not one farmer in a hundred could tell you at the end of a year how many dozens of eggs or how many pairs of chickens he had sold. Still less could he tell you how many of either his family had eaten. So it must all be guess-work about such crops, while practically every bushel of wheat, corn, and oats and every bale of cotton or hay, and every pound of tobacco is carefully set down in official records.”
“That reminds me,” said Irv, “of the remark a farmer once made to me, when deploring the poverty of himself and his class.”
“What was it?” asked Will.
“Why, he said that lots of men in the cities got two or three thousand dollars a year for their work, while he never yet had got over five hundred dollars for his. I questioned him a little, and found that he didn’t take any account of his house rent and fuel free, or of all the farm produce that his family ate. He thought the few hundred dollars he had to the good at the end of the year, after paying for his groceries and dry goods, was all he got for his labor.”
“Speaking of these unconsidered crops,” said the planter, “I fancy it would astonish us if we could have the figures on them. It is said, for example, that more than a million turkeys are eaten in New York City alone every winter. Now, if we count all the other great cities and all the little ones, and all the towns and all the country homes where turkeys are eaten, it will be very hard to guess how many millions of these fowls are raised and sold and eaten in this country every year.”
“It’s hard on the turkeys,” moralized Will Moreraud.
“Well, I don’t know,” answered Phil. “I remember reading a story by James K. Paulding called ‘A Reverie in the Woods.’ He tells how he fell half asleep and heard all the animals and birds and fishes holding a sort of congress to denounce man for his cruelties to them. After a while the earthworm got so excited over the matter that he wriggled himself into the brook. Thereupon the trout, who had also been one of the complainants against man’s cruelty, snapped up the worm, and swallowed him. Seeing this, the cat grabbed the trout, and the fox caught the cat, and the eagle caught the fox, and the hawk made luncheon on the dove, and so on through the whole list. I imagine that that is nature’s way. Everything that lives, lives at the expense of something else that lives. It is all a struggle for existence, with the survival of the fittest as the outcome. And as a man, or even a commonplace boy like me, is fitter to live than a turkey, I think the slaughter of those innocents is all right enough.”