We have no adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms.

We have few means for easing the burdens of household labor for the farmer's wife, and hence the larger the farm, the more property it represents, the more men laborers it demands for the owner's successful conduct of the business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength, time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer's helpmate.

These are some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States more seriously than ever before.
The girls of the farms want to go away from home to find easier work than their mother's kitchens afford quite as much as do the boys who wish to get away from the summer drudgery and the winter dulness of the isolated farmstead; and now the girls can get away easily and often do.

It is the lack of workers to adequately aid those in command of agricultural life which is more than all things else the difficulty that must be faced, wrestled with, and overcome if we would keep adequate numbers on the farms.

The effect of the drift away from the country upon general family life is too evidently bad to need any intensive statement here.