A SOFT AGE

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 266, 6 August 1937, Page 10

A SOFT AGE

Comments of a Country Woman “Do you knoiv, I am beginning to think that it is right when they' say our people are becoming soft.” The speaker was a visitor to Wellington—a woman nearer sixty than fifty years of age, who, after spending half of her life on a farm in the King Country, had come to town. She had not come for pleasure. Women of her type do not often travel for the mere pleasure of seeing other places. She was too busy for that kind of thing. Back there on a hill farm, miles away from any township, she had given birth to six sons and six daughters, and at the same time had played a major part in lhe management of the farm—a Government-owned allotment beyond the reach of metalled roads. “It seems to me that our boys are getting .soft,” she said. “I know they don’t work as hard as they used to when I was a girl; too many of them are on the dole. Now I’m inclined to think they don't play as well as they did thirty years ago. . . . And after seeing the 'Wellington ladies munching cakes and pastry in the tea-rooms every afternoon—well, are they likely to produce bigger and better sons than we did? The sooner I get back to the farm the better. . . . We expect the lambs at the end of the month; hope the price will be as good as last season.” Her mission to 'Wellington was to see the Minister of Lands and persuade him to do something in the direction of repairing some twenty yards of road (now a running stream) which lay between the farm and the cream wagon on a clay road. She caught the train for home the afternoon succeeding her interview with the Minister.