STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 187 



and cheerfully promote the requisite means. It would not be 

 well for him to ape the dandy. He would be apt to make poor 

 work of it if he did; and the object would not be worth the wool 

 if he should gain it to perfection. But he should be farther from 

 the clown than from the dandy even. There should be nothing 

 out of good taste and sound propriety; nothing shabby about him 

 or his household. One farmer with shabby premises, a shabby 

 person and a shabby family, does more to make the profession 

 despised than two of his best neighbors can to make it honored. 



Again, circumstances not attributable to the government, nor 

 to individual farmers, may for a time operate unfavorably. Our 

 own colonial history is an illustration. No governmental influ- 

 ences, emanating with ourselves, crushed the farmer. The farmers 

 of those times were a high-minded set of men, as true to them- 

 selves, at least, as those of the present day. But there was the 

 difficulty of manufacturing in a new country; there was a neces- 

 sary dependence on foreign manufacturers; there was much 

 perversity and m(jre ignorance on the part of the English gov- 

 ernment; our fathers were not allowed to manufacture such 

 articles even as they could have produced advantageously; the 

 best they could do was to import them and send abroad agricul- 

 tural produce in pay; one consequence was that nearly all the 

 people turned their attention to agriculture; another was that in 

 spite of all exportation of produce, there was an over supply at 

 home. As late as the beginning of this century, the fore quarters 

 of veal, in the inland parts of New England, were thrown to the 

 pigs; the hind quarters were sold for two and a half cents a 

 pound, and pay taken in miserable India cotton at fifty cents a 

 yard; if the lawyer wrote a dunning letter of three lines at the 

 farmer, it took about twenty pounds of beef or veal or pork, or 

 nearly half as many pounds of fine fresh butter, to pay for the 

 job. Everybody in those days were well paid, except the farmer. 

 He was paid almost nothing. All that time it was as difficult as 

 now for the poor to get food, for though the farmer asked but 

 little for it, the poor man could not get that little in money, or 

 anything else that would be taken in pay. This was a pretty 

 good ilhistration of the policy of exporting agricultural produce 

 in exchange for foreign manufactures. It was amazingly depress- 

 ing to the cultivator of the soil. No wonder the best lands were 



