The Fifth Commandment

Economics of the Family

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 3

Track: 27

Dictation Name: RR130P27

Date: 1960s-70s

St. Mark 7:6-13, continuing our studies on Biblical Law with “The Economics of the Family.” Mark 7:6-13:

“6He answered and said unto them, well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, this people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

7 Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

8 For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do.

9 And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.

10 For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death:

11 But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free.

12 And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother;

13 making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.”

The word property was once a very highly regarded word. It now has a bad connotation because there has been for so long a time a studied assault on the word. During our War of Independence, of course, one of the popular slogans of the day was “Liberty and Property”. In those days indeed it was unthinkable to separate the two concepts liberty ad property. They went together. Now people very often wince at the term ‘property rights’ and some of the broader uses of the word property that were once commonplace make people bridle. For example: it was once commonplace for writers to speak of wives being the property of their husband. Women don’t take kindly to that expression nowadays. And yet, of course, St. Paul speaks of the husband and the wife having a property right in each other with respect to sex.

What does property mean? Why is it a perfectly legitimate word? It comes from the Latin ‘proprius’ which means not common with others, own, special, individual, peculiar, particular, proper, with also the sense of lasting, constant, enduring, permanent; all good connotations. And in terms of virtually every society, the fact is that a man does have a property right in his wife and children. Sometimes this concept has been, as we shall see in a moment, very, very wickedly abused. But it is also true that a wife and children have a property right in the father and in the husband. In fact, the law in many states to this day underwrites that often to the point that the Old Testament did not permit. For example, in many states, a husband cannot cut off his wife or children in his will. They have, according to law, a property right in him.

Now I stated that in some cultures, this property right is not under God as it is in Biblical Law and it is thoroughly abused. For example, Roman law permitted the sale of children. This of course, has been a very common power in pagan history. The rationale of such things is that to maintain the continuing life of the family in a time of crisis, the younger members can be sacrificed. This is the rationale in Japan of selling daughters into prostitution in times of economic hardships. But such sales are forbidden in Biblical Law. For example, Deuteronomy 23:17 says there shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel nor a sodomite of the sons of Israel. Leviticus 19:29 “Do not prostitute thy daughter to cause her to be a whore, lest the land fall to whoredom and the land become full of wickedness. Ye shall keep my Sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary. I am the Lord.” Notice the connotation of this latter passage which associates the children and preserving them from evil with keeping the Sabbath and reverencing God’s sanctuary. To revere the sanctuary and to rest in the Lord means that one cannot do evil with one’s children. There are limits to our powers over one another, of the claims of children on their father or mother, of the power of a husband over his wife and children, or of the claims of a wife on her husband. God is the true and only absolute property owner over us. And so our rights in one another are subject at all times to the absolute Law of God.

Now having said this, it is important for us to look at a passage of scripture that is sometimes misunderstood. This is Exodus 21:7-11. Exodus21:7-11,

“7And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.

8 If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.

9 And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters.

10 If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.

11 And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money.”

Now this is the only passage where the word sale is used and it is very commonly misunderstood and part of the problem of course is that sale today has a bad connotation with us. if you’re selling a person, you’re selling them into slavery. And yet of course, it was not uncommon a generation or two ago to speak of selling one’s services and those of us who are older recognize that as a perfectly familiar term. The word sale once had a neutral connotation.

Now what is the meaning of this passage? To understand it, we must realize that marriage in the biblical pattern, in Biblical Law was normally by dowry, that is the groom gave a dowry to the bride. This was her protection. It was the inheritance for her children. It could not be alienated from her and her children either by him or by her. It could be forfeited by the children if they were apostate or lawless. Now if there were no dowry, there was no marriage. It was then not a marriage, but a concubinage; and even if the spouse were the only wife, if she did not receive a dowry, then she was (according to law) a concubine. Now in this passage in Exodus, what is in view is marriage. And it speaks of marriage, her duty of marriage. So marriage is in view. But here is a girl from a poor family. Now, in such a case, the father very often added to the dowry, but in such a case, the family is very poor and so a special kind of marriage existed. Instead of the wife-to-be receiving the dowry, her family did and she married into a wealthy and powerful family. She went in first as a maidservant as it were on approval. This was an opportunity for the man or if it was for one of his sons, to have her in the house for a period to see if she were a girl who was capable of assuming responsibilities and so on. She could not be treated as a servant. She was there on a different basis. She could not be sent out into the fields to work with the hired hands. She was there as a prospective bride, and if she were not acceptable, then she was redeemed, that is the money was returned and she went home to her father’s house. Something of a similar pattern, patterned after this law prevailed in New England in the early days of our country. As a result, this piece of law is very different from what the modern mind thinks it to be.

Now it serves to indicate to us that dowries were an important part of marriage. Sometimes the father provided the dowry for his son; very often the son went to work and provided the dowry himself. This was very common. It did provide a sound economic base for the new family. They did not begin with nothing. They began with a financial state. The husband could borrow that dowry with which he had endowered his wife, and use it, paying interest, for whatever business venture he was to undertake. But it was not his to alienate.

Now the European dowry system was the exact reverse of the biblical. In the European dowry system, the dowry was by the bride’s father to the groom, and it created an ugly system in Europe which is just beginning to disappear whereby men shopped around for the girl with the biggest dowry. And this led to making girls a liability in a family. The biblical dowry, however, laid the foundations for the economic security for the family and insofar as in most cases the young groom went out and worked for a time to build up the dowry. It made him first of all a responsible man before he married and then the father himself, of the bride, added something to the dowry by way of his blessing upon the marriage. One of the old American customs in this respect was that the father of the bride gave to the young couple a young milk cow which was to be the mother of the herd, a new herd, to supply milk for the new family and also meat. In cases of seduction or rape, the Biblical Law provided that the guilty party had to endower the girl with the dowry of a virgin. In such a case, the girl therefore went to marriage with a double dowry, both that provided because of what had happened to her and that provided by her husband at the time of marriage.

One of the interesting aspects of the entire dowry system is that a double dowry in a sense was taken into marriage. The dowry was not only that of the actual money, the gold or silver which was the dowry, but the training, the wisdom, the faith the girl took into the marriage was spoken of also as ‘her dowry.’ And so it is for example, we find in such books as Ben Sirach’s Wisdom, this statement, “A wise daughter shall bring an inheritance to her husband, but she that liveth dishonestly is her father’s heaviness.” It is interesting to read Ben Sirach because he has a great deal to say about marriage. And by and large what he does is simply to reflect the Biblical Law except at one point. The book of Proverbs speaks of the ideal woman and says that she openeth her mouth with wisdom and in her tongue is the law of kindness. Ben Sirach’s idea however was an absolutely silent wife. [Audience snickers] Here is the difference between man’s hopes and God’s provision. Man wants a wife who is perfect in all respects and silent, but God says she openeth her mouth with wisdom and in her tongue is the law of kindness.

Now another aspect of the economics of the family was the aspect of support. First of all, parents have a duty to provide for their children, to support them materially and spiritually, to rear them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord as well as to provide them with material support. But second, children when adults have a like responsibility to care for their parents materially and spiritually as needed. This is emphatically stated by our Lord. In the passage which we have read [Mark 7:6-13], our Lord condemned the Pharisees because they allowed a man to renounce the support of his parents by saying that which you were going to get, I’ve dedicated to the Lord and I’ve given it to the temple, therefore, I am free according to the law of the Pharisees. And Jesus declared that this was making the Word of God of none effect through your traditions which ye have delivered. Thus, Jesus emphatically made it clear that gifts to God were not acceptable when duties to parents were not fulfilled. Our Lord Himself was mindful of His duty to His mother. And he assumed her support when she became a widow. He maintained her support to the time of His crucifixion. We know this because of what transpired on the cross. Any statement made according to the law of the day from a cross or by a dying man without being written was legally valid. It was a will and testament. Our Lord from the cross as the eldest son having the care of his mother, turned to his cousin, John and said, “Behold thy mother,” and to Mary, “Woman, behold thy son.” He committed Mary not to any of the other children, but to John. As the main heir, he had cared for her. As the main heir, he provided for her future.

The main heir, throughout scripture, supports and cares for parents as the need required. Abraham lived with Isaac and with Jacob, not Ishmael nor his sons by Keturah. Isaac lived with Jacob, not Esau. Jacob lived with Joseph and therefore gave to Joseph a double portion. Now the converse also holds true. The child which supports and cares for the aged parents is the main or true heir. Inheritance is not a question of pity or of feeling, but of godly order. And one of the best ways for parents to understand who their true heir is, is to look at their children and say, if the time of need comes with which of my children could I reside and feel welcome?

Now to understand the question of inheritance and wills in the Bible, we must understand the word that is used there for a last will and testament, and the word is ‘blessing.’ It is blessing. An inheritance is precisely that. It’s a blessing by the parents upon the children. And the entire concept of a blessing or an inheritance is a religious concept. And therefore, for a parent to confer a blessing on an unbelieving child or a rebellious or a contemptuous child is to bless evil. We can understand from this why Rebekah was so tremendously concerned when she saw that her husband Isaac was going to bless Esau—Esau who was both godless, and whose marriage was to a woman who had nothing but contempt for her in-laws, so that there was nothing but trouble in that relationship. And so Rebekah was rightly concerned that her husband was about to bless evil, and so she took steps to prevent it. The biblical wills therefore had blessings and curses, and to cut off a child was a total curse. Jacob, for example, pronounced a curse on Reuben, Simeon and Levi.

Now the general rule of inheritance was primogenitor, that is the oldest son inheriting a double portion, so that if there were three sons, the estate was divided into four parts and the oldest son received half and the other two sons each a fourth. However, primogenitor is the rarity in the Bible rather than the rule because although the eldest son had the priority according to law, this priority was set aside if he were not a believer, or if he were rebellious and contemptuous of his parents. And so it is extremely rare in biblical history that the eldest receives the central inheritance. The parents, according to St. Paul, as well as the Law in the Old Testament, had a duty to provide an inheritance as far as their means afforded. St. Paul’s reference is in II Corinthians 12:14. The Father could not alienate a godly first-born son for personal feelings; neither could he favor an ungodly son or a delinquent son. If there were no worthy sons, the daughter became the heir and the son, as it were. If there were no sons or daughters, the next of kin inherited. The son of a concubine could inherit unless he were sent away with a settlement. A maid or a slave could inherit if there were no heirs or if there were no godly heirs. Thus, the blessing had to be pronounced upon faith. It had to be pronounced primarily upon the child—son or daughter—who was ready to assume the most responsibilities with respect to the parents and was the most godly.

Now the Biblical Law states further with regard to inheritance that the state could not seize the property or confiscate it. This is very emphatically underscored by Ezekiel in [the Book of Ezekiel] 46:18. This last point is important in view of the situation today.

The Biblical Law of inheritance was God’s Law. The modern laws of inheritance are the state’s laws, and the state is progressively making itself the central heir. In some countries, of course, it is the only heir today. The state in effect is saying it will receive the blessing above all others. And the state today is assuming the dual role of both father and child. It offers to educate all children in state schools, and to support all needy parents as the great father and great son of all. It offers support to the aged as the true son and heir. And these things are tied together. The state claims the right to your inheritance—either a portion of it or ultimately all of it—and therefore it says we will support you, because we are, after all, your true heir. And similarly, it educates the children as the true parent and then assumes the role of their son subsequently. In both roles, the state is the great corrupter of God’s established order, the family, and is at war with it. Inheritance, in Biblical Law means blessing. The blessing cannot be on the state. It must be on Godly children.

Finally, another aspect of the family economics. Throughout history, the basic welfare agency has been the family. It has made provision for its need members, its sick, for educating its children, for caring for parents, for coping with emergencies and disasters in the family circle, and it has done far more than the state can ever do. Even today, the state’s total investment in education does not equal that of families. The state can never assume the role of the family without ultimate financial bankruptcy. When the family assumes its proper role as the great welfare agency, when it takes care of itself and its own, it strengthens itself. But the state’s entrance into these areas bankrupts people morally and financially.

God’s order is the only true order. It is the only order that works. And any nation and any family that does not conform itself to God’s order pays a penalty.

Let us pray.

Almighty God our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for Thy Word and we thank Thee that Thou hast called us into the family of faith and made us Thy sons in Jesus Christ and Thine heirs and that we have received Thy blessing. Enable us our Father therefore by Thy grace to be a blessing to those whom Thou wouldst have us to bless, to prosper our godly children to bless Thy true Church and at all things to rejoice in Thy Law and in Thy so great salvation. Our Lord, we thank Thee for Thy guidelines. Thy Word is truth. Prosper us in Thy truth and make us free and great therein. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all with respect to our lesson?

Yes…

[Audience] What is the relationship of a godfather to {?}

[Rushdoony] Today it doesn’t have too much meaning, but in origin, the godfather was a close family friend chosen normally, not in terms of just personal feelings, but in terms of strength of character and faith who would, in a sense, support the parents in their efforts to bring the child up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, so that he in a sense would be at their elbow if they had any problems with the child, to try to support them or to implement what they were doing, if they need correcting to correct them. In other words, the godparents stand with the parents at baptism. The purpose is to underscore the fact that he is there to help them fulfill the vow and covenant they make in baptism to rear the child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Yes…

[Audience] If small children are orphaned, what does scripture say about who is to assume responsibility for their needs? {?} survive on their own?

[Rushdoony] If the parents have the means they do. If not, in the biblical pattern, relatives did. And this was very common.

[Audience] The husband’s, or the wife’s family?

[Rushdoony] It was usually the husband’s but it often was the wife’s family as well. This was very common until not too many years ago and I can recall just in my ministry and seeing a number of cases where parents were killed in an automobile accident and some relative took the children in. This is now disappearing in the last few years or it’s being treated as though it were a headache and a problem but this was once done automatically and it has been done through the centuries but nowadays the family is tending to forget its responsibilities and feeling that the state should take over everything. This is the part of the corruption of our day.

Yes..

[Audience] {?} comment {?} the law, {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, and this has been one of the things that has helped destroy the sense of family responsibility because the state takes over the right to designate who shall have custody.

Yes…

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] For what?

[Audience] For {?}

[Rushdoony] I couldn’t—

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, for nieces and nephews, yes.

[Audience] And…. {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s a good question. What responsibility do we have for our nieces and nephews when the parents are not fulfilling their responsibilities under God?

The answer is beyond urging the parents to meet their responsibilities, there’s not much we can do except to pray. This is a difficult situation, but we can’t go on nagging about it. It doesn’t do any good, but we should make our statement and our witness and then it’s in the hands of God. As Ezekiel made clear, when we make our witness, we are innocent of their blood. We’ve done our duty.

Yes…

[Audience] I have a {?} When you {?} … and children {?}

[Rushdoony] We are responsible for where we send our children and to send children into an unhealthy environment is morally wrong. And so when churches become corrupt, as they very often do, we have an obligation to withdraw them because it will lead to their corruption and then of course, we must find another church or undertake all the more zealously their Christian education ourselves.

Yes..

[Audience] In the case of a marriage where one set of the parents is not Christian, and not following God {?}, what is the responsibility of that couple {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, their responsibility is still to honor those parents.

Now—

[Audience] But {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes…

[Audience] How do you honor {?}

[Rushdoony] How do you honor those whom you cannot agree with in other words? Very simply. You do disagree with them, but you disagree with respect and you do give them the honor that is their due. It is possible for us to differ very radically with people and yet to have respect for them and to do honor to their positions.

Yes…

[Audience] {?} marriage … {?}

[Rushdoony] Who does what?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, in such a case, if the wife is the believer, she is distinctly enjoined both by St. Paul and St. Peter from nagging her husband about the faith. She is required to be a godly wife to him. She has a responsibility as far as she can to rear her children in the faith but she cannot make the faith a battleground between her husband and herself.

Now we are forbidden to marry unbelievers, but if we have married and then have come into the faith we are not to break up that marriage unless the unbeliever breaks it up.

Yes…

[Audience] Ah, I’d like some information on why at the time of the Declaration of Independence that there, {?} and Adams had already put in {?} pursuit of happiness. Why {?} the majority of the men {?} scriptures {?} were believers, how did they ever allow him to put the pursuit of happiness, because a criminal enjoys stealing, and that’s happiness to him.

[Rushdoony] A good question. You are right, the majority, overwhelming majority of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence we know to have been very zealous believers. Then why was the change made and the reference to property left out and pursuit of happiness inserted?

The reason for it was this: the final draft was turned over to Jefferson, although there is good reason for believing that John Adams and the others, who represented a very conservative viewpoint, wrote the basic outlines. Jefferson later claimed credit for it and our liberal historians give him credit for it. But he simply worked out the final draft.

Now why was it given to Jefferson? Well the reason was this. Jefferson, together with Franklin, was the diplomat, the foreign ambassador. The Declaration of Independence wasn’t saying anything to Americans. They had already in a sense made clear that they were independent of King George. This was a document that was going to be shipped to Europe, to each of the courts—to the French court, to the German court, to the Spanish court, to the Dutch court—in order to get funds to back up the American cause. Therefore, it had to be in large part a propaganda measure. And so the language of it was deliberately altered to appeal to the European mind. In fact, you might say the language is semi-Deistic rather than Christian in the prologue. And the whole purpose of it was to be a promotional document as it were, for an ambassador to take to the various courts and say, you see, we’ve made it open now that we are separate from England, we are a separate country. We are asking you for money and we are presenting this document to indicate where we stand.

So it was a promotional piece of literature in part and we cannot understand it apart from that fact. Its significance here was minor. Its importance in Europe in securing foreign loans was very great.

[Audience] But it had backlash with the American people.

[Rushdoony] Yes, because we have misunderstood a great deal connected with the Declaration of Independence, both that it is a declaration of independence from the king (not from England; they were already independent of England) and second because the prologue was designed to please these diplomats and to get foreign loans. And you see, all these liberal diplomats in Europe liked the idea of America being the dream republic of the philosophers, and so the language of the philosophers of the day was used in the prologue.

Yes…

[Audience] If I took ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ in the most extreme sense, they said that there was a revolution going on in the streets, an {?} Quaker was wounded in the streets, whose dedicated purpose was to destroy {?}. Am I to do like the Good Samaritan and bring him back to health?

[Rushdoony] No, for the simple reason that the Good Samaritan was dealing with an individual who had been attacked by thieves. And in the case you referred to it is warfare. And there is a difference between warfare and works of mercy to a person who has suffered attack from evil men.

Yes…

[Audience] We don’t have to love evil, do we?

[Rushdoony] Never!

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Never. We are never to love evil.

[Audience] {?}}

[Rushdoony] Yes…

Well our time is almost up, but I’d like to share a couple of things with you.

First, very briefly, I have a map here which is perhaps not discernible from your seats, but it is from a book entitled The Great American Desert by W. Eugene Holton. Now we’re not familiar with the term, ‘the Great American Desert,’ although it was once common in geography books because we don’t like the term and we’ve abolished it. But what does the Great American Desert take in? Well, it takes in most of Texas, most of Kansas, almost all of Nebraska, most of South Dakota, a good deal of North Dakota and it comes over to the eastern portion of—western portion of the state of Washington, a half of Oregon, almost all of California except the area from San Francisco Bay on up North on the coastal mountains and to the coast; apart from that, only a few spots that do not make up the great American desert. Now that seems shocking to us that we’re living here in what is, according to geographers, a desert. But men have lived in deserts many a times, an area which in terms of total rainfall, make up a desert. And they’ve made them very rich and fertile lands, and they’ve also destroyed them totally.

Central Asia was once one of the centers of civilization. But today that area is drifting dust and the ruins of what were once cities, farms, orchards, dry lakebeds and the like. The Sahara was once orchard and cattle country. And there are parts of this area that get as much rainfall as the Sahara.

I bring this up because it takes us back to what we saw earlier that man has an obligation to use the earth under God. Babylon was once one of the richest, most fertile farming areas. Today it’s down to bare rock in many areas and is drifting sand in others. The Great American Desert has become the richest and most fertile area in the world today. It can, if men do not use the earth properly, again become a desert.

Then the other item I’d like to call to your attention is from a book by Robert E. Pike, Tall Trees, Tough Men and we forget that the wilderness and the hard days were so close to us that they disappeared only a few years ago in much of America and that Americans were a tough breed because they lived hard lives. So I’d like to read just a passage or so, on the logging camp.

“The old-fashioned logging camp consisted of a combined cook shack and dining room, a men’s bunk room (known in the New England woods as the bar room or ram pasture), an office, a filer’s shack for the man who sharpened the saws, a blacksmith shop, sometimes a separate shack for the teamsters and downstream from the drinking water, a 5-hole back house, and a hovel, as the horse stable was always called. Since the back house had an open front it was well ventilated and washed by wind and rain.

“The curious word hovel was also used as a verb. A man might say, ‘I hovelled with Pete Boyle and Squeeze hole Brook last winter,’ or ‘I wouldn’t hovel with that so-and-so if I never had a job!’

“The tote road at a new site was generally done by summer or early fall, then the crew moved in and along with other duties, started to put up the camp. A couple of horses would twitch in the logs, tree-length, 40-feet, 60-feet, 80-feet as required on each side. And men at each end would quickly notch them and roll them up, one on top of the other to form the sides and ends of the building. In earlier days, the roof was made of coals and covered with bark and the floors, when there were floors at all, were made of faced poles. These were later replaced by cheap boards toted in from outside. The roofs were covered with tarpaper held on by coals and nails and mud or moss was stuck into the chinks between the unbarked logs of the walls. The very earliest bar rooms (and they persisted here and there even into the 1880s, were low structures, with a large square opening in the middle of the roof over which was built a log cupola plastered with mud inside to prevent it from catching fire. There was indeed a door, but usually there were no windows and no bunks. It was commonly said that the women lived considerably worse less than their oxen, who at least had fresh straw to lie on.

“Under the cupola of this primitive hovel was built the camp boos, campus, or caboose or fireplace. Four large logs were laid in a rectangle and the interior was filled with sand on top of which the fire was built. A rude swinging crane was erected at one side on which hung kettles for boiling water and for cooking. In one corner was dubbed the bean hole. The beans were almost inevitable exposed to the mixture of sand and wood ashes, but the cooks asserted that these were as good as pepper and aided the digestion.

“The smoke from the fire, it was hoped, would go out through the hole in the roof, but as a matter of fact, much of it stayed inside where it penetrated every thread of clothing so that one could smell a logger half a mile away. What was worse, the omnipresent smoke caused sore eyes. When it got too bad someone would open up the door to thin it out, but the sub-zero weather did not permit the open door policy for very long. On the other hand, when the fire burned low, the cold air came through the open cupola and the men half froze.

“There were no bunks and no chairs. The men ate standing out of a common kettle. For a bed, fir and hemlock boughs were sometimes strewn on the bare ground and on these was laid a 20-foot wide spread stuffed six inches thick with cotton batting. When one of those things got wet, 20 men could hardly lift it! Such spreads were still being used on drives as late as 1930. On top of the first one was spread a second and about a dozen men crawled in between, lying spoon-fashion. Those great covers were especially hard on small men sleeping in the center. If a man wanted to turn over, he cried out, “Flop!” and everyone, without waking, flopped. [Laughter]

“By 1860, however, these windowless, stove less bunkhouses had largely been improved by the addition of a couple of windows, a floor of poles faced on their upper sides, and an immense cast iron box stove five feet long placed in the middle of the chamber. Also, two-man bunks were introduced. In most New England camps, these were built in two tiers and were of the muzzle-loading variety, that is, one crawled in from the open end. Upright logs or hand-hewed timbers 8 x 8 inches separated and supported the bunks. Sometimes into these timbers, auger holes were bored into which sturdy wooden pegs a foot long and two inches through were driven to serve as ladders. The rows of bunks continued the whole length of the rooms and often around one end, while in front of the rows extended the famous deacon seat. This was the split half of a log, flat side up, supported on legs stuck into auger holes. The deacon seat was about the only article of furniture. There might be a chair made from a flower barrel or a crude stool but that was all. There was no mirror hanging on the wall to tell who was the loveliest of all. The lumberjack was not coquettish. On the contrary, it was widely believed that whiskers kept one’s face from freezing. If he wished, the logger could cut hemlock boughs or some marsh hay to put on his hard bunk, but he frequently did not choose to.

“Typical was Joe Powers, a robust gent who could carry a barrel of flour under each arm. Joe worked for the Brown Company and later for International Paper on the Kennebec. He once had to go down to Rumford Falls, supposedly for three weeks but he cut his visit short. The beds there were too soft for him. ‘I never had a night’s sleep in the whole time,’ he declared, as he rolled gratefully into the blankets on his bare-board bed, closed his eyes and in an instant was snoring like a baby.

“On the tiers of bunks where the men slept two together, the upper was the more fetid. My own uncle, 92-years old in 1966, once told me that starting in October of 1892, he stayed for 125 days at a camp on Indian Stream, New Hampshire. ‘It snowed every day,’ he said, ‘I never saw another winter like it and I never saw the camp by daylight except on Sunday. The first night I arrived, I slept in an upper bunk but the air was so bad that the next day I took the only lower one left, in a corner. It had an icicle thick as my leg and three feet long lying between two logs right beside my nose. I slept beside that icicle for four months and I never had a trace of a cold. I never was sick and I never weighed so much again in my whole life as I did that winter living on baked beans and salt pork and working from before daylight until after dark six days a week.’

“There you have one of the many sound reasons why the lumberjacks like their hard life with its hard work. Instances are many of farmers who stayed home all winter, suffering from colds and asthma but who hired out in the spring to go on a drive, working in ice water up to their belly buttons 14-hours a day, sleeping in wet blankets, eating course food, constantly risking their lives, they found their illnesses dropping from them as if washed away. They never could explain the why of it but you couldn’t fool them as to the fact.”

Well, I think that’s enough, but he goes on to say that these men lived into their late 80s and 90s and were hale and hearty to the last days. This is America as it once was.

Well with that, we are adjourned.