even to-day, when you give a
Homeburg man a bright golden daylight hour of leisure, he has no more
use for it than he would have for a five-ton white elephant with an
appetite for ice-cream. And that, Jim, is why I can't speed myself up to
appreciate a young man who has never worked and never intends to. I
still have to look at him with my Homeburg eyes. And in Homeburg, when a
man doesn't work when he has a chance and takes what amusement we have
to offer as a steady diet in perfect content, we know something is the
matter with him--and we are sorry for him.

Leisure has killed more people in Homeburg than work ever did. For years
our biggest problem was the job of keeping our retired farmers alive.
When a farmer has worked forty years or so, and has accumulated a
quarter section of land, and a few children who need high school
education, he rents his farm and moves into town, where he lives
comfortably on eighty dollars a month and fills a tasty tomb in a very
few years. It isn't so hard on the farmer's wife, because she takes her
housework into town with her and keeps busy. But when the farmer has
settled down in town, far from a chance to work, he discovers that he
has about fourteen hours of leisure each day on his hands and nothing to
do with them but to eat. Out of regard for his digestion he can't eat
more than three hours a day. That leaves him eleven hours in which to go
down-town for the mail and do the chores around the house.

He stands it pretty well the first year. The second year is so long that
he begins to lay plans for his centennial, and about the third year he
takes to his bed and dies, with a sigh of relief. That's what leisure
does to a Homeburg man who isn't used to it. And that is one of the
reasons why, when I see a man in New York with nothing to do from
choice, I think of the sad army of the unemployed in Homeburg draping
themselves around the grain office every day in fine weather, and
wearing away the weary years in idleness because they are too old to
work, and don't have to, anyway.

Of late years we have been working earnestly to conserve our retired
farmers. They are fine men, and we hate to see them wasted. We have been
trying to reduce their leisure--just as a city man tries to reduce his
flesh. We elect them to everything possible. We have taught a number of
them how to play pool in the Commercial Club. We have started a farmers'
elevator, a farmers' bank and a planter factory, and