farm communities, and if any added proof were needed to indicate that
the stamina of city populations overbalances the country it was
furnished by the draft records. Any group of college and Manhattan Trade
School girls could be pitted against a group of women from the farms and
win the laurels in staying powers. Nor must it be overlooked that we are
not dealing here with uncertainties; the mettle of the girls has
been proved.

In any case the fact must be faced that these agricultural units will
not do domestic work. Nine-tenths of the farm houses in America are
without modern conveniences. The well-appointed barn may have running
water, but the house has not. To undertake work as a domestic helper on
the average farm is to step back into quite primitive conditions. The
farmer's wife can attract no one from city life, where so much
cooperation is enjoyed, to her extreme individualistic surroundings.

A second obstacle to the employment of this new labor-force is due to
the government's failure to see the possibility of saving most valuable
labor-power and achieving an economic gain by dovetailing the idle
months of young women in industrial life into the rush time of
agriculture.

One department suggests excusing farm labor from the draft, as if we had
already fulfilled our obligation in man-power to the battlefront of our
Allies. The United States Senate discusses bringing in coolie and
contract labor, as if we had not demonstrated our unfitness to deal with
less advanced peoples, and as if a republic could live comfortably with
a class of disfranchised workers. The Labor Department declares it will
mobilize for the farm an army of a million boys, as if the wise saw,
"boys will be boys," did not apply with peculiar sharpness of flavor to