76 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



and they must see that good farming will afford them the means 

 for an attractive life. 



The best farmers must set the example. They must use 

 their wits and their capital, and their knowledge of the trade, 

 to show what are its capabilities ; and this example will call 

 for no sacrifice, for the one thing they have to show is how to 

 make money, and plenty of it, by an improved and intensified 

 system of agriculture. They must calculate well the chances, 

 that they may avoid loss and the example of loss, and then they 

 must venture their money and their time on what their reason 

 teaches them to be advantageous. 



If we could really have an " Association of High Farmers " 

 that should make a combined effort throughout all New Eng- 

 land, and if this association could induce the good-old-way men 

 to cease from their teasing of all who attempt novelties, we 

 should make a much faster progress. But all such schemes 

 are futile. Our only hope must lie in the quiet efforts of single 

 farmers, here and there, men who will be, generally, neither 

 philanthropists nor advocates, but only quiet, hard-working, 

 hard-thinking men, who are bent on making money from their 

 farms, who have the brains to see that good farming is always 

 the best farming, and whose success will be worth more than 

 all other influences in making it fashionable for all other 

 farmers to follow their example. 



We may rail at the good-old-way man as much as we please ; 

 there is only one lever that will ever get him out of his old rut; 

 that is the knowledge that money is to be made by the better new 

 way. Under the genial influence of " cash profits " the veriest 

 hunkerism of the inland hills will melt like the dew before the 

 morning sun ; and our carper shall be a carper no more, for- 

 ever, but a foremost light of the modern school. All these 

 things he now rails at shall then be familiar habits with him— 

 since his grandfather's time. 



