1884.] VARIOUS VIEWS OF FARMING. 221 



garden, filled with a generous assortment of such fruits and vege- 

 tables as the several members of his family are fond of. It will 

 require less skill and business ability to grow early peas, early let- 

 tuce, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, asparagus, grapes, 

 apples, pears, plums, and the other fruits and vegetables found in 

 a good garden, in sufficient quantit}' for family use, than to grow 

 a single one of these good things in such perfection as to be able 

 to excel everybody else, and so make one's own price in the mar- 

 ket, as a specialist must do if he makes his specialty a great suc- 

 cess. Every farmer should have a good garden, whatever his 

 principal crops may be. 



My criticism on that class of farmers often styled 



WELL-TO-DO FARMERS, 



is, that in their eagerness to increase the sum of their possessions 

 they too often overlook some of the prime objects in living. They 

 "plant more corn that they may sell more hogs, to get more 

 money, to buy more land, to raise more corn, to keep more hogs, 

 to buy more land," and so on. A great many, too, have put their 

 surplus gains into the village savings banks, when they should 

 have been expended for home comforts, fruit trees and shrubs, 

 better carriages, better furniture, greater conveniences for the 

 kitchen, running water at the sink and at the stables, ice in an ice- 

 house, stoves in the chambers for the comfort of children, guests, 

 and hired help, more books and magazines of a refining and ele- 

 vating tendency, and a hundred other things that wives and chil- 

 dren have asked for, but without getting. 



New England farmers who hurry off to the savings bank with 

 every spare dollar should remember that their dollars are largely 

 loaned to parties who use them for building up the cities and large 

 towns; thus giving these increased power over the country from 

 which those dollars have been drawn; or it is sent directly West, 

 to aid the pioneer farmers and railroad stockholders in increasing 

 that competition of which many of us here so bitterly complain. 

 Let the well-to-do farmer, then, who has a little surplus to invest 

 from his annual savings, consider well whether he had better 

 entrust it to strangers to be used in building up cities and improv- 

 ing distant lands, or whether he shall invest it in his own farm, and 

 in his own neighborhood for making better roads, building more 



