Page:Hine (1904) Letters from an old railway official.djvu/145

 month of the previous year. If our crops were short we did not starve our work horses. We sometimes found it paid, even with a poor crop in sight, to go to the bank and borrow rather than neglect the ditching in a wet field. If we made some surplus money we did not blow it all in for tools and improvements. We knew that the inevitable lean years preclude throwing the fat in the fire. If we ran behind some year, we did some retrenching, to be sure, but we did not lose our nerve, did not lose our faith in the future.

Some kinds of fertilizers on the farm are said to make rich fathers and poor sons. The way some railroads have been run for a record you would imagine that race suicide had reached a point where no further generations were expected. One of the gravest of our mistakes has been the application of the comparative statement, regardless of its effect upon our men. The farmer finds it wise and economical to arrange work for several monthly men in order to minimize the number of day hands for his rush seasons. In the winter he may lay them off, but this is for a period sufficiently long and sufficiently