AGRICULTURAL DEYELOPMENT A REMEDY 

 FOR ''HARD TIMES." 



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During the past two or three years there has been coming 

 to us from every corner of the land, in an ever increasing 

 vohmie, a strange watch-word of alarm and distress — strange 

 indeed in a land of abundance, a country which sends annu- 

 ally 140,000,000 bushels of its surplus wheat to the hungry 

 people of the Old World. 



It has not been confined to Maine alone, but from the 

 farthest West and remotest South the umvonted alarm is 

 sounded up through otherwise quiet valleys, down village 

 streets, reaching across from hill-top to hill-top, passing 

 along our indented coast, and going from mouth to mouth 

 all over the land. The wash-woman, standing beside her 

 over-turned tubs, with arms a-kimbo, and several children 

 playing upon the floor at her feet, thinking of the few hun- 

 dred dollars she has laid away in a Savings Bank, which may, 

 possibly, be the next to follow the prevailing fashion and 

 " go up " — shakes her head as she hears the sound repeated 

 b}^ some friendly rival in the same business in which she is 

 engaged, and goes about some other work with a sigh, and 

 possibly, a sob. The day laborer looks at his rusty pick and 

 spade or his useless hod ; thinks of the " good old times " in 

 the old country when he could live for sixpence a day if he 

 could only get the sixpence ; and of his hungry children at 

 home whose ijreatest want is bread — and re-echoes the watch- 

 word which comes from his co-laborer. The mechanic leans 

 against his clean, smooth bench, where the fore plane rests 

 in silence beside its brother, picks his teeth with the only 

 shaving found upon his shop floor, and looks vacantly out of 



