PARTISAN REVIEW
be better if the money was given the sons of the old lumber–
jacks whose farms are plastered with mortgages. Lambs are
selling for only twenty-five cents a piece further west. The
Ioway farmers are up to something again now. Strikes and
picketing. Even the county agent wished them luck.
The boss didn't join in with the old gabmouths. He would
have dipped thru thunder and lightning. He was impatient to
cut his oats and begin his fall plowing.
Only about once a week did the boss have time to glance at
the papers. That was Sunday when he got his copies from the
minister. He never discussed politics though his neighbors who
looked up to him wanted him to run for justice of peace. Politics
had nothing to do with his having lost his shirt in dairy when
butterfat fell to ten cents a pound. It had nothing to do with
his having been forced to sell half his Jersey herd and go into
beef cattle and sheep. He felt that if he were given the right
chance he could settle things for himself sin J le-handed, settle it
the way one strong man, facing another across the table, can
settle a score. All he wanted was that the world let him alone.
He had the Dutch stolidity. His huge moustache like the
stuffing out of an old horsecollar completely covered his lips
so that you weren't surprised he rarely opened them.
Last spring the boss had violently quarreled for the first
time in his life. The young blacksmith had come back to the
village after having lost his job in a Detroit factory. He met
the boss in church. His head was buzzing with new ideas. He
said working in a factory knocks you against a thousand other
fellows.
It
sharpens the brain up like a plowpoint. That is why
workers must show farmers what to do. The reason the boss
didn't see things right yet was that he was poisoned by this
here capitalism. Every time he gave himself a lick he took the
eggs in like those of a botfly so that his guts and brains were
full of maggots. He said all this to the boss to whom cities
were still the devil's, and a factory the devil's chief drop hole.
Who was laboring till the blood clouded his eyes to payoff his
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