EXTENSIVE, INTENSIVE FARMING. 33 



about one thousand more, involving at savings banks' rates of 

 dividend ninety dollars annual interest charge, and as your labor 

 goes in for three hundred to four hundred dollars annually, 

 you announce that your income is from muscular labor, that 

 you are not capitalists and that you propose to remain where 

 all labor remains, the recipient of the fruits of men's muscular 

 effort. Did you ever know any man by muscular labor to get 

 wealthy, or to achieve more than a low measure of success? 

 Never will you and I achieve anything noteworthy so long as 

 the measure of our effort is our own, unaided muscular labor. 

 Men achieve success by operating with other people's muscle, 

 by increasing their business, and you will have to make your 

 business larger and employ labor and capital both if you succeed 

 beyond unambitious labor. You say, We cannot make machin- 

 ery work on our farms in a degree adequate for competition 

 with the West. If you tell me that you must depend alone on 

 muscular labor on these hills you announce to my mind that 

 you ought to get off the farm very soon, for in an age of metal, 

 of machinery, no farmer should content himself with muscular 

 labor in which the muscles are hardened at the expense of mental 

 force and activity. You tell me you cannot afford to till, but 

 there is no high farming without tillage. Grass farming is 

 nature farming ; grass farming is necessarily low farming. Till- 

 age must come. It requires more labor, more capital, more 

 mechanism and more of plant food. By broadening your farm- 

 ing, capitalizing it, you broaden yourself and your social and 

 intellectual horizon. In an age distinguished by great enter- 

 prises and great captains of industry, you must broaden out your 

 farming and make it as large as your mental resources and the 

 possibilities of your soil will permit. 



While engaged in professional work in the West, my father 

 became eighty odd years of age and the time came when the 

 ancestral acres must go upon the market at a mere song or I 

 must drop my work there and pick up the threads of life where 

 eighteen years before I had laid them down, on the old home- 

 stead where four generations had preceded me. Could I afford 

 to drop a good salary and take up life on a rocky farm four or 

 five miles from railroads and fifteen from markets? What was 

 to be the future of New England ? What could be done in New 

 England? Would labor pay? Would capital pay? Could 

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