If I chanced upon a farmer who had no particular quarrel with the existing order of things, who was conservative and cautious and sceptical of the efficacy of change, I was quite sure to find that he was an admirable farmer, thrifty and energetic and industrious, with a thorough knowledge of his business down to a frugal care of minor details. But if, on the other hand, I fell in with a farmer who was clamorous for radical economic change, on the ground that he and his class were being ruined by the injustices of existing economic conditions, I soon began to feel a suspicion, which all my observation deepened into a conviction, that the man of this type was fundamentally a poor farmer; his buildings and fences were sure to be out of repair, and his stock showed signs of suffering for want of proper care, and the weeds grew thick in his corn, and his machines were left unhoused and suffered more from rust than ever they did from wear. This would be absurd as a generalization with any claim to wide applicability, as would be any generalization based upon my casual experimenting; it was the comical uniformity of my experience in this case as in some others that impressed me. The real difficulties of the situation for many of the Western farmers one could not fail to see. Apart from material misfortune and apart from sickness and ill-luck, there is the inexorableness of conditions which seem at times to hold them to a life of servitude with no escape from unprofitable drudgery, and from the carking care which burdens men who are hopelessly in the clutch of debt. I grew impatient at times with the tone of Philistine patronage and superiority adopted by the sturdier farmers. Theirs was the harder work no doubt and theirs the shrewder carefulness and the more provident handling of their instruments, but even hard-won success is sometimes so strangely blind to the obligations which arise from the fact that subjective difficulties are as real and are often far more difficult of mastering than those which are objective. Often it appears at its worst as, with utter disregard of the duty of helpfulness, it chants its heartless creed in the terms of the fore-ordination which lightly dooms all the non-elect of high efficiency to the deep damnation of beggarly dependence or of endless failure in the struggle of life. Two hundred miles west of Omaha the wages earned at the livery-stable in Council Bluffs were exhausted, and I was obliged to look for another job with which to replenish my store. I was following the line of the Union Pacific Railway, and, having spent my last cent one mid-day for a dinner, I went up to the first section-boss whom I met in the afternoon’s walk and asked him for a job. He was a burly Irishman of massive figure. Without a moment’s hesitation he told me that he was in no need of a man, but that Osborn, the boss of the next westward section, the thirty-second, with head-quarters at Buda, he knew was looking for one.