222 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



comfortable dwellings, school-houses, lyceum halls, and for public 

 libraries, and thus making the difference between city and country 

 life less unfavorable to the latter. 



Had a reasonable proportion of the wealth that has been accu- 

 mulated from the cultivation of New England soils, during the 

 past two hundred years, been re-invested in New England soils 

 and New England homes, instead of being sent away, New Eng- 

 land might to day have been a garden, from Long Island Sound 

 to the Canada line. 



Had New England farmers expended their surplus upon their 

 own land, 1 should have had no occasion now to" allude to that 

 large and most pitiable of all the agricultural classes — the heavily 



MORTGAGED PARMER. 



For, a man who is struggling at fearful odds in the vain attempt 

 to make farming pleasant and profitable without maintaining a 

 due proportion between land and working capital is indeed him- 

 self mortgaged. He is like the wild animal of the woods that has 

 allowed himself to be drawn into the hunter's snare. He is a slave 

 and a prisoner while bearing the name of freeman. 



Mr. Russell, secretary of our Massachusetts Board of Agricul- 

 ture, when I asked him the other day what I should say to the 

 Connecticut farmers, said: ''Tell them that the greatest fallacy of 

 the age is the belief, entertained by so many people everywhere in 

 America, that farming is a business which can be successfully 

 carried on without capital." 



If it is a mistake that well-to-do farmers make in not investing 

 more of their surplus savings in their own farms and homes for 

 the purpose of making their farms more profitable and their homes 

 more homehke, it is a still greater mistake for one with limited 

 means to invest it all in land and have nothing left with which to 

 stock it and work it. 



On one of the days I had set apart for writing this paper my 

 eyes fell upon a letter from the wife of a large farmer in one of our 

 best New England States. She has been married ten years, — 

 was formerly a teacher. The farm is her husband's old home, his 

 birth-place; but it is heavily mortgaged. It is so large that a half 

 dozen men are required for doing the work, and more in the 

 busiest seasons. The cultivated fields are some of them so far 

 from the buildings that to haul four loads of manure from the 



