THE FARMER'S ERRORS. 353 



errors of farming. Leaving great tracts, like our swamps, of 

 the richest land npon New England farms, idle and worthless 

 for want of draining, is simply a waste of capital ; but making 

 land barren by bad ploughing is a waste of both capital and 

 labor. 



Of all classes of men on earth, the farmers, taken as a body, 

 are the greatest wasters of labor. Until within a few years all 

 their work was accomplished by brute force. While art light- 

 ened the labor of the manufacture of every article that the 

 farmer used, every thing that he produced was without the aid 

 of art. None of his labors were lightened by machinery, ex- 

 cept of the most simple kind. If I had the first plow I ever 

 held, to exhibit here to-day, it would be the greatest curiosity 

 of your exhibition. 



When I was a boy, all the wheat and r3'e were cut with 

 sickles. Cradles were only for oats, and reaping machines had 

 not been created. The grain was all threshed with flails, and 

 the greater portion of it winnowed in the wind, or with the old 

 Dutch fan. How would an Illinois farmer look now, getting 

 out a thousand acres of wheat by such rude means ? Now ask 

 yourself if the winnowing mill is an improvement ; if the 

 threshing machine is better than the flail ; if the reaper is bet- 

 ter than the cradle ; or the cradle better than the sickle ; for 

 this is all modern improvement, as well as the horse-rake, the 

 horse-hoe, tlic flexible harrow, and all these beautiful iron 

 ploughs, and many, many other labor-saving implements for the 

 farmer. And yet, improvements in agriculture are behind 

 every other branch of industry in the world. Not only in 

 labor-saving machines, Ijut in many of the farmers themselves, 

 who seem to be the most clumsy and worst-improved machines 

 of all. And what is worst, they are the hardest to improve. 

 They cannot see their errors ; and if they do see them, are 

 unwilling to make a confession, which they think they will do 

 if they change their old system. I have known men who 

 would not buy a new, smooth iron plough, because that would be 

 an acknowledgment that it was better than their own old-fash- 

 ioned, clumsy, wooden mold-board, wooden land-side model of 

 their great-grandfather's plough, with its awkward wrought-iron 

 share, which they had always contended was the best plough in 



the world. Oh how my back has ached, trying to push and 

 45* " 



