“What you say is true enough,” he answered. “We live in an age of high civilization, and civilization means city life, and that means great centres of population, and that gives rise to congested labor markets with all the want and misery which you describe. All this, as we have it now, in this country, is of comparatively recent growth, being complicated by the vast numbers of our ignorant immigrant population, and we have by no means adjusted ourselves to it yet. You tell me of an army of unemployed in Chicago, and I can tell you, in reply, of a chronic demand for help in this country-side, which I know well; a demand so great that within the limits of a few neighboring counties we could put fifty thousand men of the right kind to work.” “Yes,” I said, “I have met with an amazing demand for workers ever since I left Chicago. But this is the busy season in the country; when the winter comes, would not the men who answered to the demand for agricultural laborers be forced out of employment again and back upon the chance livelihood of the towns?” “Not unless they preferred it,” he replied. “Of course the demand is exceptional at this season. How great it is you can infer when I tell you that, for the next five or six weeks, almost any sort of a man could get his board and a dollar a day, and men of fair skill and experience two and two dollars and a half a day, while the best men will command, for certain kinds of work, as high a wage as three dollars and a half a day besides their keep. “But the point is that our farmers prefer to hire men by the month for the whole season. They want their help from the 1st of April until the end of November, and they are willing to pay an active, steady fellow twenty dollars a month and everything found, even to his washing. And the demand is so steady and the difficulty of getting good, industrious men so great, that multitudes of our farmers would be willing enough to keep the right sort of hands through the winter months and pay them something for the little that they could find for them to do, for the sake of having them through the spring and summer and autumn when men are hard to find.” * * * * * On the next day I reached Blue Earth City at noon, and spent a dime at a bakery for a mid-day meal, and then went bowling off toward the Iowa border at Elmore, which place I counted upon reaching by nightfall. One dollar remained to me of my last store, and there is a marvellous fund of the feeling of independence in a dollar for one who is familiar with the sense of cowing, unmanning insecurity which comes of being penniless. Already I had stopped once in southern Minnesota, and so large a sum as a dollar would certainly see me well into Iowa, I was thinking, before I should be obliged to halt again to replenish my purse.