FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 403 



Do you realize that cheap grain and cheap meat liave brouglit British agri- 

 culture to the verge of bankruptcy? We are bringing distress and ruin upon 

 England by the very abundance and clieapness of our means of living which 

 we offer them. This is a new and startling rendering of tlie old command, '*If 

 thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he be thirsty, give him drink; for in so 

 doing thou shalt heap coals of tire on his head." 



The farmer must study these problems of the relations of production and cheap 

 transportation to universal competition if he would not be ground to powder 

 between the upjier and the nether millstones of over production and unlimited 

 competition. i)o you say that such reasoning would lead long-sighted calcula- 

 tors to sell their high-priced farms before further depreciation and buy and 

 improve cheap farm lands before the rise comes? I would hardly undertake to 

 deny the correctness of such an inference, but what a tide of immigration 

 would this send to our northern counties ! 



HEALTH-SEEKERS, OR HEALTH-OWXERS? 



Here is a vast region of wonderful beauty, where health and healing fill earth 

 and air — a land waiting for tlie husbandman to "tickle it with a hoe that it 

 may laugh with a harvest," Yet for some incomprehensible reason emigration 

 seems to avoid it, and farmers wander elsewhere from Halifax to Texas in 

 search of farm lands. The handful of population it has acquired has been 

 drawn thither by lumbering rather than farming interests. The history of 

 many a settler was given by a member of the legislature in a recent conversa- 

 tion : " We went there to lumber, and then to quit; we had no more thought 

 of farming than of flying. We put in a few vegetables in the cleared space 

 around our lumber camps, and the yield was so remarkable that we cleared off 

 a small field and put it into grain, when the harvest was so wonderful that be- 

 fore we knew it we were farming. We knew the country was good for lumber, 

 we found that it was better for farming. That's the way Sanilac county was 

 settled. Here is my friend the representative from Huron county, who will 

 tell you the same story for his county." 



In my hurried trip through this nortiiland last September, the present con- 

 dition and future possibilities of this region continually pressed upon my mind. 

 As 1 rode through these vast forests and breathed in the wonderfully invigorat- 

 ing air; as I passed here a company of lumbermen and there a hunter with his 

 gun or the angler with his rod; as I confronted the hollow-eyed and pale- 

 cheeked seeker for health, the question came continually into my mind, shall 

 this wonderful and beautiful northland for all time be given up to the hunter, 

 the lumberman and the health-seeker, or shall the health oivner take possession 

 of these murmuring solitudes and fill them with happy homes and prosperous, 

 fruitful fields, the abodes of health, plenty and content? If he is a benefactor 

 who causes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before, much more 

 is he a well-toorker who shall plant healthy and happy homes where now is 

 naught but the wildness and savagery of nature. 



