3IO AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



until night, about seventy-five per cent of you would be dead. 

 The waste material that you cast off your bodies would kill you. 

 It is not necessarily a poison, 'but it does not contain oxygen 

 enough to purify your blood and sustain life. I exhale a little 

 .and you breathe it in. You would not eat that way. Why do 

 not people ventilate better? The Lord knew better than that. 

 He did not want all this waste material floating about in the 

 air. The waste material that comes from the engine along the 

 railroad track is waste material from the fuel consumer. The 

 Lord made a plant and gave to its leaves the power to take up 

 this waste material and utilize it. The chair was once waste 

 material ; the wood from which it was made came from the 

 oak tree, the leaves of which had the power to take up the waste 

 matter and make wood out of it. Do you know that the bread 

 nnd the potatoes you ate for dinner, last summer were waste 

 material floating in the air which came in contact with the 

 leaves of the potato plant, and the leaves had the power to take 

 it up and make potatoes of it. The same is true of the corn, the 

 peach, the apple and the pear. You ate for your dinner what 

 your grandfather had eaten before you. Your grandchildren 

 will eat what you have eaten. This is the cycle of construc- 

 tion and reconstruction going on forever. 



God gave to the farmer the mission to produce food for the 

 race. He is God's right-hand man and he ought to be a good 

 one. If he is not, he ought to stop farming. He is the agent 

 who furnishes human nutrition, and it is the greatest business 

 in all the world. Before we can have facilities for manufac- 

 turing, transportation, and before we can have even religion, 

 we must be fed. I do not like starved Christians. They do not 

 look good to me. Here -we have a constructed agency 

 out of the two materials, and the longer the Almighty farmed 

 with them the richer that agency became. This brings me to 

 another subject. 



There are two 'kinds of farmers — constructive farmers 

 whose farms get ^better, and destructive farmers whose farms 

 get poorer the longer they farm them. You belong to one 

 class or the other. Do you know that nine-tenths of all the 

 farmers in the United States belong to the last class? It is a 

 broad statement ; I wish it were not true. I believe that you 

 and 1 have been put into this world to help the Almighty to 



