President's Address. 19 



A friend of mine moving west nearly twenty-five years since, 

 purchased a small place and built a house; but year after year he 

 obstinately refused to set out shade trees, fruit, or flowers, or even 

 to sod his front yard. He said it was of no use, he did not intend 

 to stay there. He wanted to sell out and go elsewhere. Yet he 

 remained there more than twenty years, and had it not been for the 

 efforts of an excellent wife, his place would have been a house, but 

 not a home, for the whole of that time. This class of farmers seem 

 to me to be both unreasonable and selfish. They will do nothing 

 that will benefit those who come after them, and in this respect are 

 like the Irishman who declared that as posterity had never done 

 anything for him he would never do anything for posterity. 



Another class includes many of those who succeed upon their 

 farms, and expect to remain on them; but if one of them has a 

 farm of one hundred and sixty acres, and is doing reasonably well, 

 instead of improving it, and making home beautiful and pleasant, 

 he begins to wish for another, or perhaps two more quarter-sections 

 that lie near him. After he gets his four hundred or five hun- 

 dred acres he is no better satisfied than before, but thinks he needs 

 enough to make a thousand-acre farm. Instead of being satisfied 

 with this, his one thousand acres is, as he thinks, only the nucleus 

 around which he is anxious to get a farm upon which he can do 

 business upon a grand scale. Will this man, with his immense 

 farm, and his mania for more land, stop to set out a few fruit trees, 

 or flowers, a strawberry bed, and other small fruits ? Will he 

 devote time to making lawns and gravel walks around his home? 

 He has no time for this. His herds of stock, his large and mag- 

 nificent fields of grain occupy his time to the exclusion of every- 

 thing like the little plat about his house. Sometimes such work 

 seems to him childlike and foolish. The son of one of this class 

 married a very refined and excellent young lady, and, wishing to 

 please his wife, although he occupied a portion of his father's farm, 

 commenced to set out shrubbery, small fruits and flowers; his 

 father came along while he was doing it, and ordered him to cease 

 and go at something else; he would have no one upon his farm 

 spending his time in such a foolish manner. A few years since I 

 visited a farmer of this class upon business. I consider him one of 

 the best farmers in the northwest. After concluding my business I 

 started toward his garden. He called to me, saying: " You need not 



