Chapter 10

Riding into the country recently, I saw at one of these little stations a pair of young men, leaning against the station-house. They had evidently been waiting for the approach of the train, but they did not stir from their positions. They were young men whose life had been spent in severe and unremitting toil. Their hands were large, and coarse, and brown; their faces and necks were bronzed; their clothing was of the commonest material and pattern, and was old and patched besides; and they had a hard look generally. There was the usual bustle about them, but they did not seem to mind it. At last, they started, and these are the words that one of them spoke: "Come, Bob, let's go over and see if we can't tuck away some of that grub." So both turned their backs upon the train, and upon me; and as they went over to see if they couldn't "tuck away some of that grub," I got a view of their heavy shoulders, and their shambling, awkward gait. A pair of old draft horses, going out in the morning to take their places in front of their truck, would not move more stiffly than those fellows moved.

Now these young men taught me nothing, for I had seen many such before; but through them I took a fresh and a very impressive glimpse into a style of life that abounds among the rural population of America, and shows but feeble signs of improvement. These men, who, when they eat, only "tuck away grub," of course "go to roost" when they sleep. They call the sun "Old Yaller," naming him in honor of a favorite ox. When they undress themselves "they peel off," as if they were onions or potatoes; and when they put themselves into their Sunday clothing, they "surprise their backs with a clean shirt." When they marry, they "hitch on," as if matrimony were a sled, and a wife were a saw-log. Every thing in their life is brought down to the animal basis, and why should it not be? They labor as severely as any animal they own; they are proud of their animal strength and endurance; they eat, and work, and sleep, like animals, and they do nothing like men. Their frames are shaped by labor; and they are only the best animals, and the ruling animals, on their farms. As between the wives and children who live in their houses, and the horses and cattle that live in their barns, the latter have the easier time of it.

Having brought every thing down to the animal basis in their homes and in their lives, their intercourse with other men will naturally betray the ideas upon which they live. They are usually very blunt men, who "never go round" to say any thing, but who blurt out what they have to say in a manner entirely regardless of the feelings of others. They enter each other's houses with their hats on, and "help themselves" when they sit at each other's tables, and affect great contempt for the courtesies and forms of polite life. They are exceedingly afraid of being looked upon as "stuck up;" and if they can get the reputation of being able to mow more grass, or pitch more hay, or chop and pile more wood, or cradle more grain, than any of their neighbors, their ambition is satisfied. There is no dignity of life in their homes. They cook and eat and live in the same room, and sometimes sleep there, if there should be room enough for a bed. There is no family life that is not associated with work, and no thought of any life that is not connected with bodily labor; and if they sit down five minutes, either at home or at church, they go to sleep. Their highest intellectual exercise is that which is called out by the process of swapping horses, and the selling of their weekly product of eggs and butter at the highest market price. They invariably call their wives--"the old woman," or "she;" and if they should stumble into saying, "my dear," in the presence of a neighbor, they would blush at being self-convicted of unjustifiable politeness and unpardonable weakness.

These men have learned to read, but they rarely read any thing, except the weekly newspaper, taken exclusively for the probate notices. The only books in their houses are the Bible and two or three volumes forced upon them at unguarded moments by book-agents, who made the most of internal wood-cuts, and external Dutch metal to place them in possession of the "History of the World," or the "Lives of the Presidents," or some other production equally extensive and comprehensive. There is no exhibition of taste about their dwellings. Every thing is brought down to the hard standard of use. If their wives should desire a border for flowers, they regard them as very silly, and look upon their attempts to "fix up things" as a great waste of labor. They never go out with their wives to mingle in the social life of their neighborhood; and if the wives of their neighbors come to spend an afternoon, they harness their horses, and drive off to attend to some distant business that will detain them until the women get away. It is useless to say to me that this is an extreme picture, for I know what I am writing about, and know that I am painting from the life. I know that there are hundreds of thousands of American farmers whose life and whose ideas of life are cast upon these models. Some of these are as coarse and hard as I paint them, and others are only a little better. Such a farmer's boy is brought up to the idea that work is the grand thing in life. Work, indeed, is supposed by him to be pretty much all of life. It is supposed to spoil farmers to get any thing but work into their heads; and scientific agriculturists will bear witness that they have been obliged to fight the popular prejudices against "book farming" at every step of their progress. They will also testify that the improvements made in farming and in the implements of agriculture have not been made by farmers themselves, but by outsiders--mechanics, and men of science--who have marvelled at the brainless stupidity which toiled on in its old track of unreasoning routine, and looked with suspicion and discouragement upon innovations. The reason why the farmer has not been foremost in improving the instruments and methods of his own business, is, that his mind has been unfitted for improvement by the excessive labors of his body. A man whose whole vital energy is directed to the support of muscle has, of course, none to direct to the support of thought. A man whose strength is habitually exhausted by bodily labor becomes, at length, incapable of mental exertion; and I cannot help feeling that half of the farmers of the country establish insuperable obstacles to their own improvement by their excessive toil. They are nothing more than the living machines of a calling which so far exhausts their vitality that they have neither the disposition nor the power to improve either their calling or themselves.

To a student or a literary man, it is easy to explain the necessity of the proper division of the nervous energies between the mind and the body. Any student or literary man who has a daily mental task to do, will do it before he exercises his body to any great extent. If I wished to unfit my mind for a day of literary labor, I would use the hoe in my garden for an early hour in the morning. If I wished utterly to unfit a pupil for his daily task of study, I would put him through an exhausting walk before breakfast. The direction of all the nervous energies to the support of the muscular system, and the necessary draft upon the digestive and nutritive functions to supply the muscular waste, leave the mind temporarily a bankrupt. I have never seen a man who was really remarkable for acquired muscular power, and, at the same time, remarkable for mental power. A man may be born into the world with a fine muscular system and a fine brain, and in early life his muscular system may have a fine development. Such a man may subsequently have a remarkable mental development, but this development will never be accompanied by large and regular expenditures of muscular power. If I wished to repress the mental growth and manifestation of a man, I would undertake to educate him up to the point of lifting eight or ten kegs of nails. There is danger at first of overdoing our "muscular Christianity"-- danger of getting more muscle than Christianity; and there is a good deal more danger of overdoing our muscular intellectuality. The difference between the kind and amount of exercise necessary to produce a healthy machine and the kind and amount necessary to produce a powerful one, is very great. We are never to look for great intellectuality in a professor of gymnastics, nor to expect that the time will come when a man will not only walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours, but compose a poem of a thousand lines at the same time.

If the temporary diversion of the nervous energy from the brain have this effect, what must a permanent diversion accomplish? It will accomplish precisely what is indicated by the look and language of our two young friends at the station-house. It will develop muscle for the uses of a special calling, and make ugly and clumsy men of those who should be symmetrical; and at the same time it will repress mental development, and permanently limit mental growth--at least, so long as the mind shall be associated with the body. I suppose that every fecundated germ of human being is endowed with a certain possibility of development--a complement of vital energy which will be expended in various directions, according to the circumstances which may surround it and the will of its possessor. If it shall be mainly expended upon the growth and sustentation of muscle, it will not be expended upon the growth and sustentation of mind; and I have no hesitation in saying that it is an absolute impossibility for a man who engages in hard bodily labor every day to be brilliant in intellectual manifestation. The tide of such a man's life does not set in that direction. An hourglass has in it a definite quantity of sand; and when I turn it over, that sand falls from the upper apartment into the lower; and while it occupies that position it will continue to fall until the former is exhausted and the latter is filled. Moreover, it will never take its place at the other end of the instrument, until it is turned back. It is precisely thus with a human constitution. The grand vital current moves only in one direction, and when it is moving toward muscle it is not moving toward mind, and when it is moving toward mind it is not moving toward muscle. This fact is illustrated sufficiently by the phenomena of digestion. After a man has eaten a hearty dinner, he becomes dull, even to drowsiness or perfect sleep. Why? Simply because the tide of nervous energy sets towards digestion, and there is not enough left to carry on mental or voluntary muscular operations.

A resident of a city riding into the country, especially if he be an intellectual man, and engaged in intellectual pursuits, will be thrilled by what he sees around him. The life of the farmer, planted in the midst of so much that is beautiful, having to do with nature's marvellous miracles of germination and growth, moving under the open heaven with its glory of sky and meteoric change, and accompanied by the songs of birds and all characteristic rural sights and sounds, will seem to him the sweetest and the most enviable that falls to human lot. But the hard-working farmer sees nothing of this. What cares he for birds, unless they pull up his corn? What cares he for skies, unless he can make use of them for drying his hay, or wetting down his potatoes? The beautiful changes of nature do not touch him. His sensibilities are deadened by hard work. His nervous system is all imbedded in muscle, and does not lie near enough to the surface to be reached by the beauty and music around him. All he knows about a daisy is that it does not make good hay; and he draws no appreciable amount of the pleasure of his life from those surroundings which charm the sensibilities of others.

We are in the habit of regarding the farming population of the country as the most moral and religious of any, yet if we look at them critically, we shall find that their piety is of a negative, rather than a positive character. They are men in the first place who have very few temptations, either from without or from within. There are no professional tempters around them to lure them into the more seductive paths of sin. The woman whose steps take hold on hell does not pass their doors; the gambler spreads no snares for them; no gilded palace invites them to music and intoxicating draughts; they are not maddened by ambition; and they have no vanity that leads them to degrading and ruinous display. If they are little assailed from without, they are not more moved toward vice from within. The fact that their vital energies are all expended upon labor relieves them from the motives of temptation. Men whose muscles are overworked have no vitality to expend upon vices. The devil cannot make much out of a man who is both tired and sleepy. If we inquire of the ministers who have charge of rural parishes, they will usually tell us that an audience of mechanics is better than an audience of farmers, and that the miscellaneous audience of a city is better than either. It is impossible for men who have devoted every bodily energy they possess to hard labor during the waking hours of six days, to go to church and keep brightly awake on the seventh. Country ministers will also admit that they have in their parishes less help in social and conference meetings than the pastors of city parishes, and that no great movements of benevolence ever originate in, or are carried on by, rural churches.

As a matter of course, life cannot have much dignity or much that is characteristically human in it unless it be based upon active intellectuality, genuine sensibility, a development of the finer affections, and positive Christian virtue. When a man is a man, he never "tucks in grub." When a man lies down for rest and sleep he does not "go to roost." To a man, marriage is something more than "hitching on," and a dirty shirt is a good deal more of a "surprise" to a man's back than a clean one. There is no doubt about the fact that a life whose whole energies are expended in hard bodily labor is such a life as God never intended man should live. I do not wonder that men fly from this life and gather into the larger villages and cities, to get some employment which will leave them leisure for living. Life was intended to be so adjusted that the body should be the servant of the soul, and always subordinate to the soul. It was never meant by the Creator that the soul should always be subordinate to the body, or sacrificed to the body.

I am perfectly aware that I am not revealing pleasant truths. We are very much in the habit of glorifying rural life, and praising the intelligence and virtue of rural populations; and if they believe us, they cannot receive what I write upon this subject with pleasure. But the question which interests these people most is not whether my statements are pleasant but whether they are true. Is the philosophy sound? Are the facts as they are represented to be? Does a severe and constant tax upon the muscular system repress mental development, and tend to make life hard and homely and unattractive? Is this the kind of life generally which the American farmer leads? Is not the American farmer, generally, a man who has sacrificed a free and full mental development, and all his finer sensibilities and affections, and a generous and genial family and social life, and the dignities and tasteful proprieties of a well-appointed home, to the support of his muscles? I am aware that there are instances of a better life than this among the farmers, and I should not have written this article if those instances had not taught me that this everlasting devotion to labor is unnecessary. There are farmers who prosper in their calling, and do not become stolid. There are farmers who are gentlemen--men of intelligence--whose homes are the abodes of refinement, whose watchward is improvement, and whose aim it is to elevate their calling. If there be a man on the earth whom I honestly honor it is a farmer who has broken away from his slavery to labor, and applied his mind to his soil.

Mind must be the emancipator of the farmer. Science, intelligence, machinery--these must liberate the white bondman of the soil from his long slavery. When I look back and see what has been done for the farmer within my brief memory, I am full of hope for the future. The plough, under the hand of science, is become a new instrument. The horse now hoes the corn, digs the potatoes, mows the grass, rakes the hay, reaps the wheat, and threshes and winnows it; and every day adds new machinery to the farmer's stock, to supersede the clumsy implements which once bound him to his hard and never-ending toil. When a farmer begins to use machinery and to study the processes of other men, and to apply his mind to farming so far as he can make it take the place of muscle, then he illuminates his calling with a new light, and lifts himself into the dignity of a man. If mind once gets the upper hand, it will serve itself and see that the body is properly cared for. Intelligent farming is dignified living. For a farmer who reads and thinks, and studies and applies, nature will open the storehouse of her secrets, and point the way to a life full of dignity and beauty, and grateful and improvable leisure.

LESSON XIII.

REPOSE.

"Peace, greatness best becomes; calm power doth guide With a far more imperious stateliness Than all the swords of violence can do, And easier gains those ends she tends unto." DANIEL.

"When headstrong passion gets the reins of reason, The force of nature, like too strong a gale, For want of ballast oversets the vessel." HIGGONS.

"Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of hearts, As I do thee." SHAKSPEARE.

Mrs. Flutter Budget was at church last Sunday, She always is at church; and she never forgets her fan. I have known her for many years, and have never known her to be in church without a fan in her hand, and some article upon her person that rustled constantly. Her black silk dress is death to devotion over the space of twenty feet on all sides of her. She fixes the wires in the bonnets of her little girls, then takes their hats off entirely, then wipes their noses, then shakes her head at them, then makes them exchange seats with each other, then finds the text and the hymns for them, then fusses with the cricket, and then fans herself unremittingly until she can see something else to do. During all this time, and throughout all these exercises, the one article of dress upon her fidgety person that has rustle in it, rustles. It chafes against the walls of silence as a caged bear chafes, with feverish restlessness, against the walls of his cell; and as if the annoyance of one sense were not sufficient, she seems to have adopted a bob-and-sinker style of trimming, for hat and dress, and hair and cloak, and every thing that goes to make up her externals. Little pendants are everywhere--little tassels, and little balls, and little tufts--at the end of little cords; and these are all the time bobbing up and down, and trembling, and threatening to bob up and down, like--

"The one red leaf, the last of its clan That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost bough that looks up at the sky."

Any person who sits near Mrs. Flutter Budget, or undertakes to look at her during divine service, loses all sense of repose, and all power of reflection. The most solemn exercises in which the mind engages cannot be carried on with a fly upon the nose, and any teasing of a single sense, whether of sight, or sound, or touch, is fatal to religious devotion. I presume that if the pastor wishes to find the most sterile portion of his field, he needs only to ascertain the names of those who occupy pews in the vicinity of this lively little lady. Her husband died two years ago, of sleeplessness, and a harassing system of nursing.

The Flutter Budgets are a numerous family in America. They are not all as restless as Madame, but the characteristics of the blood are manifest among them all. They never know repose; and, what is worse than this, they dread if they do not despise it. They are immense workers--not that they do more work, and harder than their neighbors, but they make a great fuss about it, and are always at it. They rise early in the morning, and they sit up late at night; and they do this from year's end to year's end, whether they really have any thing to do or not. They cannot sit still. They have an unhealthy impression that it is wrong for them not to be "doing something" all the time. Nothing in the world will make them so uncomfortable and so restless as leisure. Mrs. Flutter Budget could no more sit down without knitting-work, or a sock to darn, in her hands, than she could fly. As she has many times remarked, she would die if she could not work. To her, and to all of her name and character, constant action seems to be a necessity. The craving of the smoker for his pipe or cigar, the incessant hankering of the opium-eater for his drug, the terrible thirst of the drunkard for his cups--all these are legitimate illustrations of the morbid desire of the Budgets for action or motion. The man who has the habit of using narcotics is not more restless and unhappy without his accustomed stimulus, than they are with nothing to do. In truth, I believe the desire for action may become just as morbid a passion of the soul as that which most degrades and demoralizes mankind.

If I were called upon to define happiness, I could possibly give no definition that would shut out the word repose. I do not mean by this that no person can be happy except in a state of repose, but I mean, rather, that no man can be happy to whom repose is impossible. The highest definition of happiness would probably designate the consciousness of healthy powers harmoniously employed as among its prime elements; but there can be no happiness that deserves its name without the consciousness of powers that are able to subside from harmonious action into painless repose. I know a little girl who plays out of doors at night as long as she can see, and who, when called into the house, takes up a book with restless greed for mental excitement, and then begs to be read to sleep after she has been required to put down her book and go to bed. She would be called a happy child by those who see her playing among her mates, yet it is easy to perceive that her happiness is limited to a single attitude and condition of body and mind. A happier child than she is one who can enjoy open-air play, and then quietly sit down at her mother's side and enjoy rest. That is an inharmonious and unhealthy state of mind which chafes with leisure; and he is an unhappy man who cannot sit down for a moment without reaching for a newspaper, or looking about him for some quid for his morbid mind to chew upon. So I count no man truly happy who cannot contentedly sit still when circumstances release his powers from labor, and who does not reckon among the rewards of labor a peaceful repose.