1884.] VAEIOUS VIEWS OF FARMING. 227 



ities, if we will only use them, for making our lands as rich as the 

 richest. 



It is true that the eastern farmer has been closely pushed by his 

 western competitor, but, from various causes, that competition is 

 becoming less severe, and we are slowly learning to adapt our- 

 selves to the changed conditions brought about by the skinning 

 process, which has passed over this country like a great devastating 

 wave. The gradual loss of fertility in the western soil, the grow- 

 ing borne markets there, and the improved methods of farming 

 here, are every year placing the farmers of the two sections more 

 nearly upon the same level. 



American farmers, and I believe Americans generally, have been 

 called a race of grumblers, except when making or listening to 

 Fourth of July orations; but it must be remembered that grum- 

 bling in 'a free country is only the first step towards setting wrong 

 things right. Our progress as a thoroughly self-supporting and 

 self-governing people may at times seem slow, but when we bear 

 in mind the crude condition of the mass of material there was and 

 still is in this country, both human and earthy, and that in making 

 this great experiment the world had given us no model to work 

 from; when we look about over our hill-sides and compare even 

 our poorer homes with the homes of the average laborer in almost 

 any other part of the world ; and again when we find the leading 

 men of other nations, as well as those from other portions of our 

 own country, coming to New England for patterns by which to 

 improve the condition of their own people, and to reform their 

 own methods of government and of education, — when we bear in 

 mind all this, 1 say, if we can only be sure that our progress, 

 though slow, is real and in the right direction, we may congrat- 

 ulate ourselves that the gain is not ours alone, but that an influence 

 is being exerted that is reaching out towards the farthest corners 

 of the earth ; and that instead of the little paradise of a garden 

 and republic which our Puritan fathers in their imagination and 

 exclusiveness might have seen developing on the shores of this 

 New World, the farmers of New England and their descendants 

 are rearing a structure which must hasten the time when every 

 honest and industrious worker can, if he chooses, own a house and 

 land, and own himself, and this not only in New England and in 

 America, but wherever the names New England and America are 

 known. 



