The Farm Home

By Mrs. A.J. Wilder, Rocky Ridge Farm

After reading the staggering total of the indemnity demanded by the Allies from German and adding to that sum the amount of the country’s internal war indebtedness, it is very plain to anyone that Germany is bankrupt, that it will take many, many years to pay these debts and make the credit of the country good once more.

But there is an even worse thing which has come upon Germany—the nation is morally bankrupt, also. No one has attempted to put a money value upon this failure, knowing that the honor of a nation, as of an individual, is beyond price, but it is sure that Germany will keep paying on this debt, which it owes the world, for many years, also probably for generations.

The first installment of this debt is being collected now and that it is hard for the nation to make the payment is shown by an interview with Germany’s foreign minister, Brockdorff-Rantan, in which he says, “The peace terms are simply unbelievable, because they ask the impossible. The entente demands material guarantees and will not accept moral guarantees. This shows its distrust of us.  We desire an organized world in which Germany will have the same rights as other people.”

Germany is finding that as a nation which has for four years deliberately broken its pledged word, that word is of no value: that it is bankrupt in moral guarantees.

The entente is in the position, with Germany, of the hill man who fought another man for telling an untruth about him. He had knocked his enemy down and was still beating him tho he was crying “enough’ when a stranger came along and interfered.

“Stop! Stop!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you hear him hollering enough?”

“Oh, yes!” replied the hill man, but he is such a liar I don’t know whether he is telling the truth or not.”

When I was a girl at home, my father came in from the harvest field one day at noon and with great glee told what had befallen my cousin Charley. Father and Uncle Henry were harvesting a field of wheat in the old fashioned way, cutting it by hand with cradles and Charley, who was about 10 years old, followed them around the field for play. He lagged behind until the men were ahead of him and then began to scream, jumping up and down and throwing his arms around. Father and Uncle Henry dropped their cradles and ran to him thinking a snake had bitten him or that something in the woods close by was frightening him, but when they came to Charley he stopped screaming and laughed at them.

Charley fooled them this way three times, but they grew tired and warm and had been deceived so many times that when for the fourth time he began to scream they looked back at him as he jumped up and down, then turned away and went on with their work.

But Charley kept on screaming and there seemed to be a new note in his voice, so finally they walked back to where he was and found that he was in a yellow jackets’ nest and the more he jumped and threw his arms and screamed the more came to sting him.

“I’d like to have the training of that young man for a little while,” said father, “but I don’t believe I could have thought of a better way to punish him for his meanness.”

Boys or men or nations it seems to be the same, if they prove themselves liars times enough, nobody will believe them when they do tell the truth.

“Getting down to first causes, what makes one nation choose the high way and another nation choose the low way? What produces character and conscience in a nation, anyhow? What produces the other thing?” asks a writer in an article in the Saturday Evening Post? And the question is left unanswered.

In a country ruled as Germany has been there is no doubt the character of the nation received the impress of the rulers, coming from them down to the people. In a country such as ours, the national character is also like that of the rulers, but in this case the rulers are the people and it is they who impress themselves upon it. The character of each individual one of us affects our national character for good or bad,

Training! School training: home training: mother’s training! And there you are back to the first causes in the making of an honorable, truthful, upright individual, the kind of citizens who collectively make an honorable, treaty-keeping nation, a nation that chooses the high way instead of the low.

Mrs. A.J. Wilder. "The Farm Home." Missouri Ruralist (June 5, 1919): 23.

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