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He was riding very slowly, and both he and his horse were bespattered with mud. "There comes old Farmer Mossback," said one of the men, laughing. "He's just in from the backwoods." "He seems to have had a hard time of it," said another; "I wonder where he'll put up for the night." "Oh, any kind of a place will suit him," answered the landlord.
He was the typical American citizen. The old farmer was father to the best blood of America. His sons and his sons' sons have answered to the roll call of our country's warriors, statesmen, writers, captains of industry. Can the new farmer maintain the same relative social status? And if he can, is he to be an aristocrat, a landlord, a captain of industry, and to bear rule over the mossback?
The mossback threw a stick of stove-wood at him, and he lumbered clumsily away across the snow. But twenty minutes later he was back again, and this time he marched straight into the open shed at the back of the house, and began operations on a wash-tub, whose mingled flavor of soap and humanity struck him as being very delicious.
Two or three miles away was a little clearing where a mossback lived. A railway crossed one edge of it, between the hill and the swamp, and five miles away was a junction, where locomotives were constantly moving about, backing, hauling, and making up their trains.
The mossback was wide awake now, and he muttered something about "another of those pesky porkies." He had killed the last one that came around the house, and had wanted his wife to cook it for dinner and see how it tasted, but she wouldn't. She said that the very sight of it was enough for her, and more than enough; and that it was all she could do to eat pork and potatoes after looking at it.
You must explain him. What is it that makes the new farmer? Who is he? What are his tools? In the first place, you cannot explain the new farmer unless you know the old farmer. You cannot have the new farmer unless you also have the mossback. The new farmer is a comparative person, as it were. You have to define him in terms of the mossback.
The new farmer is merely the worthy son of a noble sire; he is the modern embodiment of the old farmer's progressiveness. The mossback is the man who tries to use the old methods under the new conditions; he is not "up" with the present times, but "back" with the old times. Though he lives and moves in the present, he really has his being in the past.
The contrast is not between the old farmer and the new, for that is merely a question of relative conditions in different epochs of time. The contrast is between the new farmer and the mossback, for that is a question of men and of their relative efficiency as members of the industrial order.
All farmers may be divided into three classes. There is the "old" farmer, there is the "new" farmer, and there is the "mossback." The old farmer represents the ancient régime. The new farmer is the modern business agriculturist. The mossback is a mediaeval survival. The old farmer was in his day a new farmer; he was "up with the times," as the times then were.
Once, when he had ventured a little too close to the house, and was making an unusual racket with his teeth, the mossback came to the door and fired a shotgun at him, cutting off several of his quills. And still another night, late in the spring, when he was prowling around the barn, a bull calf came and smelled him.
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