354 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



even if they are sincerely anxious to make the most of it, is 

 generally more expensive, and less productive, than where the 

 whole power is lodged in a single individual, who is the sole 

 owner, and on the economical management of which his pros- 

 perity depends. There is not so much feeling of personal 

 responsibility, nor so much freedom and readiness of action. 

 If there is to be consultation, conference and comparing of 

 opinions before any step is taken, as there must be where the 

 decision is to be made by a body of men and not by a single 

 individual, time will be lost and delay will follow frequently, 

 until the favorable moment has passed, and the thing to be 

 done has either become impossible or can only be done at 

 greater expense and to less advantage than at tirst. 



But the object of the State, when it made arrangements for 

 the management of the fiirm, Avere not precisely the same as 

 an individual proposes to himself in a similar case. When a 

 farmer buys a piece of land and undertakes to cultivate it, he 

 starts with the determination, generally, of making it as 

 profitable as possible in a pecuniary point of view. If he be 

 a man of large and liberal ideas, if he be truly economical, he 

 will not grudge some expenditure on his fields which may at 

 first be unproductive, if it will afterwards make a good return. 



Nor was the reasoning with reference to the general manage- 

 ment of C(n*porate property of any force, since in no case 

 would the State Farm be managed by an individual owner, it 

 having been purchased, in part at least, by the fund established 

 by the benevolent founder of the State Reform School. 



An extensive series of experiments was undertaken through 

 competent committees, with various breeds of cattle, with a 

 great variety of fertilizers and many different crops, and these 

 experiments were continued during the five years' lease of the 

 farm, when the arrangement was discontinued by the mutual 

 consent of the Board and the trustees. 



In 1859 the cattle disease known as the contagious pleuro- 

 pneumonia was imported from abroad and introduced among 

 our stock, at a time when its fatal and contagious character 

 was little known, and if it had done nothing else for the State 

 and the country beside the complete extirpation of that dread- 

 ful scourge to agriculture, wherever it exists, it would have 

 paid all the expense of its organization many times over. 



