BACK TO THE LAND

The draft bill, so bitterly fought in Congress, and made a law only against the uproarious dissent of various peace advocates and upholders of the national honor, seems already to have worked some large effect, although not one conscript has been called to the front, nor one single boy been torn away from the cherishing arms of his mother.

It is reported from many sources that agricultural work, which exempts from the draft, has come highly into the favor of a large number of sons of the big cities. They have heard, with a voice that may not be denied, the call for going to the land. They have purchased overalls of the latest 1917 model from the clothiers, and now besiege dairy, truck and ranch farmers with requests for any work of an arduous kind which will increase their country's food production, all the way from milking cows to raking the leaves off the front lawn.

Such universal love of the land must call for our commendation. The desire to live for one's nation in a truck-garden rather than dying for the same cause in a trench shows a proper philosophic regard for the value of human life. One can fight with potatoes as well as bombs and reap the harvest wheat instead of an unkind enemy.

Those men who have had experience on farms which could, if used, increase the yield of our land have a just cause for going where their services are most wanted. We need in deadly earnestness food for our armies and the armies of our allies. But the cause is somewhat less just if those men whose only acquaintance with agriculture has consisted in cultivating a small-sized moustache or in cultivating unwilling acquaintances, seek that soil which they have never known. They will probably make excessively poor farmers. They might make, under a good top-sergeant, with good stiff work, middling fair constituents of the rank and file.

The ways of the draft bill are indeed far-reaching. Who would have thought it had the power to stop the lamented rush to the big cities? However, our farmers must smell, not the conventional nigger in the woodpile, but slackers in the wheat-fields.