1883.] HINTS TOWARD SMALL FARMING. 263 



Mr. Oscar Wilde, whom we are inclined to laugh at, was a sort 

 of disguised apostle of this doctrine of lasting life. He found 

 difficulties about engrafting a healthy bloom of art upon attenuated 

 social sap in America. No doubt he will teach his best lesson by 

 proceeding to invest the cash we paid him in some choice bit of 

 homely landscape according to the latest aesthetic, small farming 

 fashion. 



All of us were once farmers in some period of our develop- 

 ment, unless it may be that we are not yet up to that condition, or 

 have, in scriptural language, climbed up some other way. 



In this view, Mr. Chairman, the plane of small farming devel- 

 opment lies between all other human strata and those curious and 

 always instructive native growths which we too often contemptu- 

 ously pass as belonging to savage life. 



Some critic may wish me to split off another layer in this 

 division betwixt the wilderness and the farm; that, namely, of 

 hunting, fishing, and the herding of semi-domestic animals. I 

 will do that if you please, or anything else to be agreeable here, 

 but we find it difficult to do so. If there is anything to hunt or 

 fish for in New England, we still hunt and fish with all the ardor 

 of the wildest man; and if our lives have become sensibly arti- 

 ficial, we return to the wilderness for a while in midsummer, with 

 even more positive pleasure than the born savage enjoys. As for 

 sheep-ranging and cattle-herding, those are quite modern ideas, 

 blooming fully to-day upon the public domain at the west in 

 splendid competition with their restricted development in the east, 

 wherever our rural villagers and small farmers allow animals to 

 run in the streets. 



Whenever, for the purposes of a talk, any fellow tries to handle 

 mankind in convenient classes, don't let us be touchy and bother 

 him too much with nice distinctions. The task is hard enough 

 any way. Human development is so wonderfully various, and 

 individuals are such strange, composite creatures, that it is almost 

 impossible to class them. They fly around so that they are as 

 hard to count and arrange in scientific order as the "speckled 

 pig" in the litter. The peasant farm boy of to-day becomes the 

 president of a great nation to-morrow, and they say our latest 

 elected governor and president of this board began public Hfe as 

 a newsboy. 



For practical farm purposes it makes no difference whether our 



