622 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The farmer's work, like woman's, may be thought of as consisting 

 of a variety of operations which may in thought be separated. But 

 in practice they are bound together by his isolation, by the meteoro- 

 logical conditions which separate seed-time and harvest, and make 

 tbem both so short that the rest of the year must be filled up with 

 other duties or wholly lost ; and by other circumstances too numerous 

 to mention. So he, like the woman, must go pottering around at odd 

 jobs, never acquiring in any one kind of work that time-saving, nerve- 

 saving, attention-saving proficiency which is rated by all economists, 

 since Adam Smith, as one of the three greatest advantages of speciali- 

 zation. In a general way, to be sure, the farmer may have a specialty. 

 It may be wheat, it may be corn, it may be cotton, it may be hogs, 

 cattle, wool, horses, or what not. Whatever specialty he has, he usu- 

 ally gets from the nature of his soil, his distance from the market, or 

 some inherited skill or inclination. But it is not usually an exclusive 

 specialty. It does not furnish the whole of his employment, but only 

 the most important part of it. In fact, it is regarded as rather a mis- 

 fortune than a blessing that his soil or other environs should bind him 

 down to any one crop. Thus, the exclusive cultivation of cotton is 

 considered an unfortunate thing for the farmers of some of our South- 

 ern States. The loan companies, whose existence and profits depend on 

 their making a deep and candid study of this question of agricultural 

 specialization, are always glad to advertise to their loaning customers 

 that their borrowing customers live in what they call an " all-crop " 

 region. Seasons are uncertain : in the " one-crop " region the ill-wind 

 blows nobody good ; in the " all-crop " region it blows everybody 

 some good, and the people who have money to invest in farm-mort- 

 gages think this is not wholly offset by the correlative fact that in 

 such regions the good wind is pretty apt to blow everybody some ill. 



We have now discussed the obstacles to specialization which lie in 

 the way of about three fourths, numerically, of the population of the 

 civilized w T orld one half being women, and half the rest farmers. We 

 may now pass to those industries and professions aside from farming 

 which must be carried on in the country, or in villages, as well as in 

 large towns and cities. We find them less highly specialized in the 

 country than in the city. The physician and the journalist, spoken of 

 in the beginning of this article, illustrate the difference. It is most 

 perfectly pictured to the eye when we walk into a country store, with 

 its groceries, dry-goods, ready-made clothing, boots and shoes, hats, 

 books and stationery, hardware, tinware, queen'sware, etc., and then, 

 after a short ride on the train, go the rounds of the city shops, where 

 all these things are separately handled. 



It needs no profound scientist to tell us why. We see at a glance 

 that density of population conduces to specialization. This is one of 

 the ways in which it relieves its own evil consequences. World- 

 crowding increases the necessity of our making our mutual help more 



