﻿“Low Down On It” 

By T-BONE SLIM 
 
The handling of concrete, which is almost as hard work as harvesting, pays 85 cents an hour. But being an eight hour day, it amounts to only seven dollars per day—out of this you must pay your own board bill. 
Now, it happens that the farmer looks highly on the value of money and considers five dollars a day enormous wages. In fact he considers five dollars beyond all reason, and out of it, and falls into a very grave error of thought, because of it. He believes the grain companies are cutting down on the price of his wheat because the said companies think he is well to do, else he wouldn’t be paying such “exorbitant wages,” (as he calls it) to those rough-necked harvesters. 
Therefore, it follows, the farmer’s whole life and ambition is bound up in the problem of cutting the workingman’s wages down to nothing, next to nothing or to the point where they would appear sweet and innocent in the eyes of the grain gamblers—in order that the speculators might be prevailed upon to dish out better prices and lavish greater blessing upon them. Another error of the farmer is he fails to credit the speculator with reason, the reason that says: “farmers must have money since they never put out any of it to the harvest hands.” 
The farmer thinks the speculator is blind and that he never has seen harvest hands coming out of harvest fields broke, cold and hungry—beating their way in tatters and begging a thousand towns. 
We will not go any farther in this, sufficient to say—the farmers’ beliefs in this case art misplaced, misapplied and result of mirages aroused by diseased thinking. On the other hand the harvest hand is equally crazy in thinking the farmer actually begrudges him the few dollars he puts out. The farmer doesn’t care two hoots in hell for your dollar—he’d just as soon toss them into the slough as bury ‘em in the coffee barrel. 
What he wants is to be absolved of the imaginary charge of paying big wages—he is trying to cleanse himself in the eyes of the grain crooks— no need of that; like any other wrong thinking man he’ll he cleaned soon enough. 
His honesty can’t be questioned. 
His thinking—can. 
—T-b. S.