When you had survived three years of this and with high hopes took your patent to the mortgage company to raise a loan at ten per cent. you found you couldn't get accommodation. Thereupon in marched your implement and other creditors with a chattel mortgage on everything you had—except the missus and the kids and the baby's bottley-by!
Then in the beautiful hot month of August it blew up black one day and the chickens scurried for shelter and you and the wife stood with your noses flattened against the window-pane—unless it was only oiled paper—and watched the big ice-marbles bouncing and heard the hail drumming flat in a few minutes the acres of wheat you had worked so hard to produce.
Or perhaps you escaped that time only to have your wheat frozen later on and when you took three days on purpose to haul in a wagonload to the elevator you couldn't get a decent offer for it. So that you pulled off your mitts and clenched your frost-cracked hands as you prepared to turn homeward with but a pitiful portion of the food and clothing you had promised the family you would bring. As you spread across your chest, inside your sheepskin coat, the old newspaper somebody had given you would your soul expand with the joy of living while you headed out into the snowy waste at forty degrees below zero?
And if after you got home and the crying young ones had been put to bed in the corner behind the canvas curtain and your wife came and sat beside you, her own tears bravely dried—if then you read in the paper that the Government had decided you farmers were so prosperous you should contribute from your easily gained wealth a free gift to manufacturers, financiers, railway magnates or others—then would you say with a great booming, hearty enthusiasm and shining eyes: "I tell you, Wife, this is the life!"—would you?
Or would you just proceed to swear—naturally, successfully, in what is known as "flowing" language?
By just such pioneer hardships were the farmers of Western Canada driven to organize in self-defence. It has ever been the history of revolt that its wellspring was the suffering of the people. Pioneer hardships it was that caused the various movements which agitated the farmers of the Western States in earlier days. When fingers become hardened and crooked from unceasing toil that achieves nothing but premature old age; when hope withers in a treadmill that grinds to the very soul—then comes rebellion.
[1] Since the formation of the organized farmers' National Political Platform several of its planks have been adopted as legislation at Ottawa, notably the abolition of the patronage system, extension of the franchise to women, total prohibition, and personal income taxation.
CHAPTER XXIV
AND THE END IS NOT YET.
The principle of co-operation draws the whole community together. It breaks down barriers. It unites the State. It gives hope to the humblest toiler. And it strengthens the great moral ideal of duty, without which no State can endure.—Earl Grey.