290 BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



manure, and sow fresh seed that will bear the light and air. If 

 shop and mill boys pull little wires for places in the world, so did 

 Thurlow Weed, so do we all. The most out-spoken man can't 

 tell everybody in a hall or in a newspaper. Some say we need 

 "what wires we've got and many more to hold the weak world 

 together. Some of us who can think of no better way, must 

 keep laying wires, perhaps, while others are content to meet face 

 to face and judge for ourselves whether we mutually look as 

 though we had always given a day's work for a day's pay, and one 

 hundred cents on a dollar. 



The trouble with secret societies is that puppets can't always 

 tell who may be jerking the long, branching wires they are 

 hitched to. 



The small farmer, in close contact with the electric earth, ought 

 to be a conservative social element independent of selfish wire- 

 pulling. 



There are symptoms of light bi'eaking in these dark places. 

 Good men see how secrecy may become the meanest cowardice. 

 They grow ashamed of fraternal conspiracies they know nothing 

 about. " Legal " robberies cannot all be hid. Children, marked 

 with the wrong and rapine of these feudal ages, have grown to 

 man's estate. Murder will out. Prosperous crime is daily branded 

 by the burning finger of scorn. 



List the whispers of old soldiers — veterans in righteousness as 

 in arms — hear the black stories, sweated out by the friendly 

 warmth of a generous pension list, covering the just and the un- 

 just like God's rain ! Row that fellow sickened with his own pol- 

 troonery in the face of battle — this one sold his famishing comrades 

 for a big profit, and the other palmed bogus dead bodies upon 

 mourning friends ! 



Rogues do not govern honest men long in secret, because the 

 latter become tramed detectives in suppressing the bad impulses of 

 their own hearts. 



Should anyone ask what this about secret societies has to do 

 with small farming, I must tell him that the millennial bean can- 

 not thrive in a tangle of selfish, secret vices. The filaments of 

 our invisible fungus may amount in the sum-total of their ob- 

 structions, to a second, third, and fourth mortgage upon all our 

 farms. The fear of hidden malice or management haunts and 



