74 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



I have had much to learn, single-handed ; I have made mistakes 

 and failures ; and I have made successes. Through all, I have 

 never been without friends whose sympathy and support proved 

 an unfailing reliance ; but I also have never been without en- 

 emies who have done the little they could to make me uncom- 

 fortable. Even to this day, when I have grown older and 

 tougher, and have learned to fatten on opposition, and when my 

 relations with my neighbors are friendly, and even cordial, I 

 am sure that the utter and entire failure of every agricultural 

 operation in which I am interested, would carry joy to all their 

 hearts, — not because they dislike me, but because my agricul- 

 tural operations represent a hydra that has come into their 

 happy valley to consume and destroy them and their wives and 

 children ; that is to say, it is in some respects a novelty. If 

 my farming succeeds, then they will adopt it, and ascribe their 

 knowledge of it to the teachings Ox" their grandfathers, but 

 until it shall succeed it is a heresy that is worthy of (and gets) 

 their profoundest contempt — if nothing worse. In all this, my 

 Rhode Island neighbors are not worse than my former neigh- 

 bors have been, and they are no worse than my Massachusetts 

 neighbors would be, if I were to come and occupy a farm in 

 the Housatonic Valley. 



Old-fashioned farmers hate new-fashioned farming. Why 

 they hate it no man can tell, nor need we ask. That they do 

 hate it is too plain to doubt, and it is this hatred more than any 

 other influence, that prevents the more rapid improvement of 

 our agriculture. Our best chance for succeeding against it is 

 to unite our forces, those of us who do not believe that an old- 

 fashioned farmer knows so much that he has a right to cry us 

 down, and to make a stout fight. 



I am not jesting. I really believe that the influence of those 

 who cry out against " book-farming," as they call all attempts 

 at improvement, is one of the greatest stumbling blocks that 

 the improving farmer meets in his path ; and that many a timid 

 man has been sickened, and deterred from his work by the 

 thought of the ridicule he must encounter from his neighbors, 

 — men who accept to-day what they decried yesterday, but who 

 none the less vehemently decry to-day what we know they will 

 accept to-morrow. We must either ignore them, or we must 

 combine to overcome them. It will be the shortest way to 



