The old gentleman would come now and then and look around the corner of the barn to see if I was at work. The frosty side of the barn in youth has one advantage. It forces the boy to think and reason out the justice of life. Uncle Daniel had not read enough of history to know that Guizot, the great French historian, says that the only thing which those who represent tyranny, injustice or evil are afraid of is the human mind. What he means is that whenever you can get the plain, common people to think clearly and with their own brains, they will sooner or later wipe off the slate of history and write freedom in big letters. On the sunny side I think I should have talked and so rid myself of my thought before it could print itself upon my little brain, but there on the frosty side of the barn I know that I said little, but reasoned it out with the clear wisdom of childhood. If Uncle Daniel had been a student of Shakespeare, he would have gone straight to that famous passage in Julius Cæsar which probably expresses the thought of 90 per cent of the humans capable of thinking, who have ever lived to maturity:
“Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights;
Yond’ Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”
I was thinking out my problem, and I want to tell you younger men that the questions which started at the teeth of my saw on the frosty side of that old barn have cut their way through the years, and chased and haunted me all through life. The injustice of labor and social conditions—that is the foundation of the trouble in the world. Upon it all helpful education should be based. Youth’s ideals will always chase you like that, if you give them half a chance, and you never can have better mental companions. I was trying to reason out one of two resolutions. Off in that dim future of manhood when I should grow up, my time would come, and I might have power over some other boy, or maybe a man. I could put him on the frosty or on the sunny side of the barn, as I saw fit. What would I do to him to pay for my session on the frosty side? Somehow I think it is natural for human beings to seek reparation and promise themselves to take their misfortunes out of someone else when their power comes. I think I should have grown up with something of that determination in mind had it not been for the poet Longfellow.
Now you will smile, you successful farmers, you dry old analyzers and solemn teachers and you budding young hopes. What has poetry to do with farming or agricultural education? What did the poet Longfellow ever do for farming? Did he ever have a hen in an egg-laying contest that laid 300 eggs in a year? Did he ever raise a prize pumpkin, or a prize crop of potatoes? Did he even originate the Longfellow variety of flint corn? Do not men need solid pith rather than flabby poetry in their thought? It is true that Longfellow would have starved to death on a good farm. Yet his poetry and the thought that went with it were one of the things that made New England dominate this country in thought. My childhood was passed at a time when we had no science to study. Bacteria were swimming all about us in the air, the food and the water. I had, no doubt, swallowed millions of them at every mouthful, and we grew fat on them. We had no books on science or bulletins, but every farmhouse had its copy of Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes. The best duck-raiser in our town was a man who could recite Bryant’s poem, “To a Water Fowl,” with his eyes shut. I think I could safely challenge many famous poultrymen to recite even one verse of that poem, yet who would say that he would not be a better poultryman and a better man if he could carry in his heart a few verses of that poem?
“There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast.”
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