38 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



New England farms are small holdings such as we have described. 

 They are mostly owned by their occupants, or are supposed to be, 

 and are therefore in all essentials homes, and we of Anglo-Saxon 

 origin know the full moaning of this terra. Volumes cannot tell us 

 more than our own hearts suggest at the sound of this word. We 

 know the influences of the word home in history. It has maintained 

 as well as destroyed armies, perpetuated nations and developed 

 peoples and civilizations, and is the key to New England's intelli- 

 gence and influence to-day, and if a division of that could be made, 

 a far greater share would come to farm homes than to all other 

 classes combined. In analyzing farm life, too much cannot be said 

 regarding the influence of a permanent home upon a people; it 

 is itself an evidence of high civilization and culture, and still further 

 perfects it. Compare it for an instant with the nomadic life of the 

 half civilized ; compare it again with the moving life of towns and 

 cities, wht-re business movements and fluctuations compel frequent 

 changes, and again with the country home life of the west, and 

 mountain regions of the south, carried on in ••dugouts," log cabins, 

 or cheap frame structures, all with unattractive surroundings, bare of 

 luxuries, or even comforts, and tell me then, if you can, that the 

 commodious, comfortable and oftentimes luxurious farm homes of 

 New England are not strong factors in developing our people ; and 

 does not entire America OA^e a debt to these homes and to the soil 

 that has maintained them. A debt is due for the men they have 

 produced, who have guided this nation among the many perils of 

 stale craft. These men were of tiie farm ; it gave them grand ideas 

 of civil and religious liberty, of true manhood and womanhood, of 

 self-restraint, dicipline and moral courage ; true conceptions of 

 which can only be born in the free aii of country life, where every 

 morning's sun gives new impetus to noble thoughts and aspirations, 

 and evenings c lira, clear r^fl ;ction upj.i, and conceptions of the 

 freedom and greatness God intended for the human race. The 

 country home wiih its imperative round of duties demanding detail 

 in every brancii, has develop jd a class of men that no city could 

 ever send out. The statesmen who have guided this nation, the sol- 

 diers who have led its armies against foreign and intestine foes, the 

 noble sailors who Have commanded its navy, its business men who 

 have added so much to its wealth, its able professional men, its 

 pioneers in the enterprise of the west, and the host of noble women 

 wQo have b-io.ne prominent in the life of the nation have almost 



