102 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



ated by a good team, which never was allowed to lie idle because 

 there was nothing to do. The mortgage on the farm had been 

 paid, the house rebuilt, and we were making money, and it was 

 all done without commercial fertilizers or financial backing, and 

 yet today we are told that a man who takes up a run-down farm 

 and attempts to pay for it, much less to get a living for himself 

 and family, has a task that no wise man would undertake. If it 

 could be successfully accomplished forty years ago what is there 

 to hinder its accomplishment today? If the problem could be 

 successfully solved in a rocky, sterile portion of the state, what 

 is the difficulty in accomplishing it in the fertile Kennebec valley? 



In the face of this recital of plain, unvarnished facts who is 

 there in this audience that dares tell me that it cannot be dupli- 

 cated with much greater ease and much less hardship today? 

 You, Mr. Commissioner, would have accomplished the same 

 result as far as restoring the fertility of the farrii is concerned 

 as we did, and with much less physical effort, because you have 

 the means, as many gentlemen here before me today have, to 

 purchase ready made, ready mixed fertilizers that we had not 

 only to manufacture from the raw material, but mix in the soil 

 by our own unaided efforts. If this recital does not prove an 

 incentive to some one to go and do better under the improved 

 conditions afforded him, I shall be disappointed, to say the least. 



But I hear some one saying "If you were so successful on a 

 farm why are you not there today ?" or "Why did you ever leave 

 a business that you were so well adapted to prosecute with such 

 rare success ?" It was a case of the man with the hoe. I was 

 then a mere boy, and farm life with all its successes was to me 

 as tedious and uninviting as it ever was to any lad, or is to any 

 one today. I simply performed my humble part from a sense of 

 duty. While others were struggling to their last degree of 

 strength, I could not do less than perform my small part, and I 

 was willing under the circumstances to do it until I had seen 

 the problem before us solved, and a ray of light opened up for 

 me in another direction. You must remember that forty years 

 aeo the social conditions on a Maine farm in the back countrv 

 towns were entirely unlike what we find today. For instance, 

 the rural delivery was never even thought of. The telephone 

 had never been dreamed of, even for the most popular sections, 

 and the local Grange was twenty years from its establishment. 



