Work Makes Life Interesting

By Mrs. A.J. Wilder

There is good in everything, we are told, if we will only look for it, and I have at last found the good in a hard spell of illness. It is the same good the Irishman found in whipping himself.

"Why in the world are you doing that?" exclaimed the unexpected and astonished spectator.

"Because it feels so good when I stop," replied the Irishman with a grin. And this ting of being ill certainly does feel good when it stops. Why, even work looks good to a person who has been thru such an enforced idleness, at least when strength is returning. Tho I'll confess if work crowds on me too soon, I am like the fiend who was recovering from influenza rather more slowly than is usually the case.

"I eat all right and sleep all right," said he. "I even feel all right, but just the sight of a piece of work makes me tremble."

"That," said I, "is a terrible affliction, but I have known persons who suffer from it who never had the influenza."

But I'm sure we will all acknowledge that there is an advantage to having been ill, if it makes us eager for work once more. Sometimes I fancy we do not always appreciate the value of work and how dry and flavorless life would be without it.

If work were taken from us, we would lose rest also, for how could we rest unless we first became tired from working? Leisure would mean nothing to use for it would not be a prize to be won by effort and so would be valueless. Even play would lose its attraction for, if we played all the time, play would become tiresome; it would be nothing but work after all. In that case we would be at work again and perhaps a piece of actual work would become play to us. How topsy-turvy! But there is no cause for alarm. None of us is liable to be denied the pleasure of working and that it is good for us no one will deny. Man realized it soon after he was sentenced to "earn his bread by the sweat of his brow," and with his usually generosity he lost no time in letting his womenkind in on a good thing.

This being the case, it is particularly pleasing to read, in the advice sent out from Washington, that it would be wise the coming season not to raise any more garden stuff than will be necessary for the family use.

Does this mean that farm women are to be let down easily from their tiptoe position of reaching out for work and still more work to keep the world rolling? It would seem a sensible thing to come about in view of the fact that according to United Press stories there is a concerted action of the part of members of the New York produce exchange to do all in their power to depress the produce and provision and grain markets regardless of the cost of production.

Still more significant is the fact stated in a recent editorial of the Kansas City Drover's Telegram that the "members of the New York produce exchange have evidently lined up the leaders of organized labor at Chicago and New York to assail the prices of farm products."

It would be the height of irony if the big companies who stand between the producer and consumer robbing both of them, should be able to line them up against each other, the laborer against the farmer: the farmer against the laborer and steal away unnoticed with their ill-gotten gains, leaving them fighting.

Mrs. A.J. Wilder. "Work Makes Life Interesting." Missouri Ruralist (February 20, 1919): 42.

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