i'How Can We Rejuvenate the Home fdea" is Title of 'W'. A. Mcllrath's ^A,ddress

See Note on Page l0 ft takes most of you back to a country or village home of 20 or 25 years ago. Then you considered it wrong to play cards, to play seven up was wicked and a real game could only be played in- the hay-mow or some other unfrequented spot. You may have experimented with trying to smoke corn silks, but any boy who smoked or endeavored to smoke real cigarettes before he could grow a beard was considered to already have a smell of brimstonC about him. The discipline of the home was rigid and you had a wholesome respect for the various uses that could be made of the woodshed. The chances are more than even that there was family worship and that you were a regular attendant.

There is a modern picture, possibly inspired by Harrthorne, which the painter calls, "IIow they met themselves." A man and a woman, haggard and weary, wandering, lost in the woods, suddenly meet the shadowy figures of a youth and a maid. Their gaze becomei fixed and stills the heart of the wanderers, and their amazement deepens into awe as they gradually recognize themselves as once they were, the bloom of youth upon their cheeks, the light of hope in their trusting eyes, blythe and radiant with the glory of the dawn. Today and here we meet ourselves.

There is only pity for the man who is forever looking backward, afraid of the future, and longing for the days and conditions that are gone, but I want you to take a look at the youth you will see as you look at the shadowy picture.

The'spirit of the home in which you are bringing up your boy is difrerent. If cards are not regularly played in ioui hbme it is -the exception., You say there is no harm in it and that it is all right for your boy to play, but when your yard manager becomes too adept at the game you let him go. You realize that the game does not mix well with business and to have the reputation of being a good card player is not a business asset.

The woodshed has been turned into a garage and its uses curtailed. - The majority of your boys who are in high school today are smoking cigarettes. You say he is foolish, but it will not do him much harm. Do you realize that there has never been a world's record made in any track event by a boy or man who smokes cigarettes? The late J. P. Watson, one of the greatest trainers of athletes, refused to waste his time trying to develop any boy who smoked cigarettes, saying he would only end in failure. Charlie Paddock goes still further and says there never will be a world's record set by a cigarette smoker. Re4 Grqnge, the idol of football, has never smoked a cigarett-e, nor has William Tilden. It means more than .we are willing to admit to have formed habits that prevent us from being the besi that we could have been. Have you ever seen a boy or man smoking a cigarette- and reading the Bible at the same time? No, you have not. for it is not done.

The brief reading from the old book, which you see in the shadowy picture, the bended knee, and the spirit of reverence, goes far in creating the_ home spirit, and ask of you to think of the rejuvenating that might be done in your home in this respect.

The training of the boy today is away from work.

, It is a common expression to hear men s:ry that they rpant to gct things fixed so that their boys will not have io work aj hard as th-ey themselves have done. The greatest asset that any boy can have ii to have learned to work from his youth up. If ybu hlvent had to struggle you ar€ out of luck, for a non-woiking boy is later a nonworkin-g-man. If you_had a really tough job requiring indifiercacc to hardship and sacrifice you would pick a man who had bccn through the -mill or- the boy who had-had a bitter fight to get an education and has a background that will make later baitles looE easy to hirn,

There are lumbermen here who have told me of the hopc they cherished that their boy would soon be carryins on the busin6ss thcl have built so carefully, yet in the very training of that boy they arl debarring him from success. There is not a captain of Gdusdv in any line ,today who djd not learn to work as a boy, and yet in- thc face. of all past experience you are not training your boy tb work.

Five years ago I left this Convention to have-a hst iisit with mv father,- and, a-mong other things, he said, one of the hardest thingi he had ever done was to tell me that I had to get out and earn riv own way through school, but it is one of the things for which I arir most thankful to him.

There are idlers in the homes of both rich and poor. but there is no-one thing that will do more to put new life int6 your homc than to have every member of that home a working Dartner.

I wonder -if you men realize just how completely you are educat- ing your_ children away from work. To give .you the definite .data on this I have prepared a chart showing what has become of the last 30fi) students who left Winnipeg High School 1920 to 1923, which allows three years for them to have become located:

I have the data covering this.in great detail, giving every line of work, should any one want further information,

It was rather hard for me to believe that with all the boys sent in from the farm for an education that only 72 returned to the land. i did not want to believe that there was not one lumberman developed out of 30Q0 and checked up on our own yard men, and we have'no high school graduates. I asked one of thi large companies to checi up on their yafd managers and they reported none. From this chart you have definite data as to just-how iompletely your boy is being headed towards a white collar job.

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The second phase of the home idea that needs rejuvenating is that lumbermen work more.

At our yards we arc selling lumber almost entirely to farmers and small townspeople, yet we sold more radio poles last year than we sold houses br idditions to houses, and there is scarcely a farmer in our district that does not require more room for sanitary living conditions for himself and family. One firm sold three full car loads of one make of radio in Saskatchewan since August 15th last. This represents half as much lumber as all the yards in the province sold for the construction of houses during the same period, and there are seven ottrer makes of radio being sold in the province. f don't know the sales of the others, nor do I want to know. It is too embarrassing. When we as lumbermen can't sell as much lumber for homes in a district where homes are badly needed as is paid out for one item of entertainment in that home, there is something that needs rejuvenating.

Go to your average customer's home. Go around to the back door. Outside you will see a coal pile, the washing machine, a barrel and sometimes storm windows, and none of these will stand the weather for long. Twenty-five dollars would supply the material for a shiplap backshed, but it is not there. When you get inside the kitchen you are standing on linoleum that cost $21, and if it is two years old it has holes in it, and you can cover the same floor with maple fooring for $27 that will last a lifetime, yet we did not sell hardwood fooring for one kitchen per yard last year, while the linoleum people averaged 27. Go into the living-room and the chances are five to one that you will see a graphophone rather than a built-in cupboard, and graphophones cost more. On the wall you see the enlarged picture with the beautiful frame and it is a 50-50 break whether we have sold a piece of picture moulding on which to hang it. It would takc $12 worth of cement and a little bit of salesmanship to put a foor in the cellar, but the foor isn't there. One house in ten in the country still lacks a brick chimney which could bc paid for out of the dccreased insurance alonc on an average'of three years, but we havc never suggested that hc build it. You can supply the material for a cistern for your town customer for what he pays for hauling soft watcr and ice in less than two years, but there arc more shares bcing sold in fox farms in our district than cisterns. Considering the commodity we havc to sell, our showing around the house is poor. Pcrhaps the woman is to blame. We will,go to the barn whcrc thc man la supreme.

From the barnyards and farms of Saskatchewan during the last ycar we shippcd 30q000 head. of cattlc to England and twice as many more to Winnipeg, supplied our own tables with bcef and butter, and as a side linc these same cows gave us over 15 million pounds of butter to sell, which brought over four million dollars. Surely the first consideration on the farm will be to providc a shadc for these cows from heat and flies in the summer and a sheltcr from the storms in winter. We have probably eold more poles for summer sheds than any other firm, yet our total sales were not as much as was spent in the same towns for silk stockings. I am ashamed to have to say it, but it is true that we sold more garages last year than we sold barns, and the total shingle sales of all the retail yards in Saskatchewan for the sheltering of stock was not any more than the replacement cost of the broken car springs around th9 barnyards of the province. One firm alone sold five car loads of springs and not a genuine Ford spring was sold by this dealer.

You look around a little further and see the chickens scratching as best they can to get their living, with as little cost as possible to the owner, and supplying the eggs with which he bought the flour and shoes for the entire family and finally adorns the table for his Sunday dinner. Surely we should sell the lumber for chicken houses,. but the value of the discarded auto casings in those same barnyards is more than the total lumber sales for chicken houses. The lumber qold at Radville for auto casings actually amounted last year to morc ihan that sold for chicken houses. And is it any wonder the barayard hog gives a grunt every time he passes a lumberman who dbes not spend as much time trying to sell material to shelter him as he does discussing the merits of the difrerent brands of smoking tobacco?

If we are going to rejuvenate the home idea there is no getting away from the fact that we must work more.

A little girl, nine years old, living 4cross the street from our yard, was appointed agent for the Saturday Evening Post and with mrrch enthusiasm declared she was going to bc a business woman and wanted us to fix her a desk on which she could spread her papers and do her writing. but after getting equipped and waiting a littlc she declared, "This is just monkey business. ff f want to carn moncy I will have to work for it. If I want orders I will havc to go and ask for them." She quit the monkey busincss and went out and asketl 52 people for busincss and was givcn eight orders. Too many of us nced this little girl to distinguish for us the difrerencc between monkey business and \rork.

Thcre are plenty of farmcrs without a fenco who havc ncvcr bccn asked for post business. We have Can't-Sag gatcs storcd away in our warehouses and we open dilapidated gatcs with nevcr a sugges-

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