AGRICULTURAL FAIRS AND THEIR BENEFITS. lOI 



art. As the primary industry, the character of agriculture not 

 only determines the price of the food of every citizen, but is the 

 measure of all human progress. If by improving the processes 

 of the farmer, production is cheapened, the purchaser or con- 

 sumer, by the great law of supply and demand, obtains his food 

 cheaper, and is thus as highly benefitted as the farmer. Indeed, 

 the improved processes release the numbers engaged in agricul- 

 ture, and afford an increased ratio of the population that may be 

 engaged in the arts that minister to our comfort and our pleas- 

 ure. Hence I hold that there should be in every state one central 

 state fair under state auspices, and possibly a limited number of 

 subordinate and local fairs. 



Among the advantages of state support to these schools will 

 be the purification of the morals of fairs. They will not be 

 dependent entirely upon gate receipts to meet the expenses, and 

 will not be under the necessity of pandering to vice. A perma- 

 nent home means a much stronger fair than a peripatetic one 

 that has no resting place. The stable fair means a complete 

 equipment of buildings, museums, and settled permanent features 

 in their conduct that cannot exist with a moving fair. Such 

 fairs can be made more educational through their accumulation 

 of objects, charts, processes and lands for illustrative trials that 

 are inconsistent \nth a homeless fair. 



FUXCTIOXS OF FAIRS. 



Primarily fairs are for the exhibit of things. Under this 

 headmg I would suggest some desirable changes in them. 



^lachinery has become the right arm of modern civilization. 

 It multiplies greatly the power of man and substitutes natural 

 and animal forces for human muscle. It will be as impossible in 

 the future to conduct successfully agriculture without a complete 

 equipment in machinery as it would be for a mob armed with 

 bows and arrows to meet an organized army with gatling gun 

 and repeating rifles. Where muscle is pitted against machinery 

 in farming it must be conducted at a fearful loss in the products 

 of the soil and in the mentality of man, for overwrought mus- 

 cles mean weary minds. A merely muscular industry must 

 occupy a low and mean place in the industries of the people and 

 in the social status of those pursuing it. It were better that 

 New .England agriculture be wiped out than to be machineless. 



