3 2 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



ming of the cream from the soil. Eleven per cent of our lands 

 are tilled, 85 to 89 per cent in the Western states, and 50 to 100 

 per cent in the European states are under the plow. Less of 

 capital, less of tillage, less of tools, less of crops, less of every- 

 thing that makes agriculture broad, rich and great, characterizes 

 New England farming as compared with that of any other 

 people; and we who peopled a nation and determined the policy 

 of the world, through the false carrying of a motto good for 

 twenty-five years ago into a new age, moved by new impulses, 

 have placed ourselves, after all this gigantic work for all the 

 world, in the attitude of pursuing the lowest type of farming to 

 be found in the civilized world. This is an age of captains of 

 industry, of mighty consolidations of capital, of the production 

 of each unit at an exceedingly small margin, making a great 

 total of profit out of the multitude of units produced. In such 

 an age we draw within ourselves and say that "small areas well 

 tilled" is the clarion or bugle call that we shall follow. And 

 what is the result? You say there ought to be great crops if 

 we have narrowed our farming down to a focus, on a few acres. 

 We have arrived at the result of a ton of hay per acre, and on the 

 twenty-five or thirty acres that we actually handle on the farm 

 we get hay enough to keep seven to ten cows, from which we 

 work out an income of perhaps four or five or six hundred dol- 

 lars, up to the salary of the ordinary fourth-class clerk. Not 

 enough, my friends, to live the life of the twentieth century, and 

 measured by this a failure. If along this line we have forged 

 our way for a quarter of a century, with no better results than 

 a ton of hay per acre, we have arrived at that historic moment 

 in Maine farming when we should cut loose from the old methods 

 and try something more vigorous and effective. 



I am here this afternoon to ask you to adopt the motto of the 

 age, to invigorate your agriculture by more tillage, by more 

 capital, by more hired men, by more chemicals, by all of those 

 factors that enlarge the productions of agriculture and accom- 

 pany greater culture of the farm. You say that labor does not 

 pay; in that you pronounce in funereal tones the death of your 

 business as a profit seeking one ; if hired labor does not pay then 

 you are not well paid. You say it does not pay to capitalize 

 farming. As your farms are not worth on an average more 

 than about a couple thousand dollars, and personal capital is but 



