268 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jail., 



Why is it that our railways are broken down with their freight 

 of provisions and supplies for winter, and were just now valuing 

 brakemen and ignorant farm hands at ninety cents a day ? 



What is the reason delightful top-buggies, phaetons, and all 

 manner of gay vehicles and harness for pleasure and pride increase 

 on our miserable roads, while small farmers declare they can't 

 afford a horse-cart, but must do all their business, shovelling in 

 and shovelling out, of a long, cumbrous lumber wagon ? 



What is the matter with Hannah and William, that they and 

 so many other young people are not happy in marriage nowa-dayr, 

 and bother our courts with suits for divorce ? 



Whose wasted manure is it that makes so much strange sick- 

 ness, sapping the vitality and undermining the strength of many 

 families? Men have extra pockets now for medicine. Lovely 

 women remind one another of their matutinal bitters — " Have you 

 took your pill this mornin\ Maria f " and they elevate their noses on 

 the street with the jauntiest air for their infinitesimal powders, 

 rejecting the less etherial tonics of our buxom grandmothers in 

 the onion, turnip, and cabbage. 



I expect daily — such is the "progress" of modern "refinement" 

 and "genteel " reform — to hear of some great plant of capital and 

 machinery to purify and spiritualize all our ordinary garden sauce 

 against "the materializing tendencies of the age." It will be a 

 " whiskey-still " under another name. The quinine habit — another 

 old man of the sea — is already loaded upon the shoulders of an 

 army of staggering Sinbads. 



We have, and always may have, large classes, more or less effete, 

 able to pay for the refinements which soothe and shorten their 

 lives. 



How much the small farmer should work for this blood-money 

 is a question for his conscience. Who takes the sword is mighty 

 apt to perish by the sword. The production of better fruits, vege- 

 tables, and grains in plenty, with a better common sense as to 

 their use in untarnished freshness, would be the strongest pre- 

 ventive of our diseased craving for refinements. 



How is it that our list of paupers, the insane and vicious, . 

 increases as we increase in unequally divided wealth, so that we 

 who are rich don't know whether we should be worth a cent or 

 not, after all our debts and bills of damages to society are settled ? 

 Having abolished human slavery, property in man, as we flatter 



