78 VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



judgment rendered that the desire for improvement has be- 

 come more than a latent longing- for something better. 



In the beginning I may be allowed this argument. It is 

 a common remark that farming does not pay as well as it did 

 a few years ago and scores are asserting that it is manifestly 

 right to abandon it at the first opportunity, and many are in 

 fact doing so. I do not maintain that it is paying great div- 

 idends, but what other industry, with capital no greater than 

 that in vested in the average farm, is paying handsomely? How 

 is it in the average township? Where are the shoe shops, 

 the wagon shops, the cabinet shops, the carding machines, 

 the saw mills, the grist mills, the occasional small woolen 

 mill, that were once scattered over our state, in total a score 

 to the township? It is a fact that nearly all of our country 

 manufacturing industries have become extinct because they 

 no longer afforded a living; they were not transferred but 

 were actually left to go to decay, which incurred a total loss 

 of capital; a blacksmith shop or two, a few grist mills a day's 

 journey apart, complete the present list of our country facto- 

 ries. Have the farms suffered extinction in like ways ? We 

 are not using fewer manufactured articles, purchased once at 

 home, rather more, in fact, but now they are made far away 

 by large corporate industries, with systematized labor, aided 

 03- the most wonderful mechanism, which has reduced the 

 skilled hand that once with rude tools made the closest joint 

 and did the most beautiful ornamental work, to a mere attend- 

 ant of a machine which, with wondrous execution, fashions 

 the same pieces even more minutely and with the speed of 

 many men. 



Now, while the shops of the town have disappeared or 

 been abandoned, the farms have not, and their producing 

 power has in most cases been fairly well manitanied, but the 

 farmer's market now, instead of being almost at his door, is 

 possibly, on the far side of the world; if the farm is not doing 

 so well it is largely because of the shifting of the industrial 

 classes to the great manufacturing centers, which forces the 

 farmer to sell in far away markets; markets which are now — 

 owing to the rapid freight trains and cheap rates -open to 

 the world and to a competition never dreamed of twenty years 

 ago, that of the bonanza farming of the West, those gigantic 

 specialties of wheat, stock, wool, beef and pork, fairly over- 

 whelm us by their immensity. 



But, after all, I reason something like this ; farms and 

 farming will always continue to exist ; we as farmers will 

 continue to do about the same things which we are now do- 

 ing, the great cities will keep on growing and keep on de- 

 manding about the same things to eat and drink and so in- 



