ANNUAL WINTER MEETING AT WARRENSBURG. 261 



aries were less than their living, v/ho entered office poor, retired in 

 four years millionares. That makes suspicion assurance. But let us 

 leave this branch of horticulture, peculiar to Washington City and 

 State capitals, and come more to the point. 



It is reciprocity of labor in our country that is desirable more 

 than " saving of money here at home." Far too much groaning is 

 made over what they say we buy; forgetting that we pay for it with 

 our surplus grain, meat, cotton, etc. So if we bought nothing 

 we could never sell anything; and this exchange of commodities 

 among neighbors, is the easiest, most profitable of all exchanges. Peo- 

 ple are made comfortable almost without knowing how it happened, 

 and are, comparatively, put in affluence. It is all profft nearly. 

 There is no middle man and no shaving. For instance, we might 

 manufacture as much again beef here instead of sending our 

 cattle to Chicago, where Pennsylvania and Ohio farmers select 

 the best, carry them home, put on several hundred more pounds, 

 return them to Chicago or take them elsewhere, and have buy- 

 ers hunt them up instead of being hunted up. Were their values 

 appreciated we could have for those vegetables a market right 

 here at our doors; our fine stock men and those who feed lor distant 

 marts would gladly take all that are offered, and find it to their inter- 

 est. There are men who, on their small places, raise such articles suc- 

 cessfully and send them to St. Louis or Chicago, in order to get money 

 enough to purchase a fine cow or a tew calves, and often find all their 

 profits absorbed by the time and expenses of transporting. 



In this view, most important of all, is the encouragement given to 

 enterprising young men who own but a few acres, of hill land perhaps. 

 We should no longer see the owner of twenty acres in the bluffs plow- 

 ing corn furrows as though his were a gieat valley farm. No wonder 

 such men become discouraged and conclude that they and their be- 

 longings don't amount to much : but now see such men as horticul- 

 turists, employing brain and muscle on every square foot, and they 

 soon begin to realize their own importance. And these men are the 

 masses on whom rests the character and destiny of the States. These 

 are they under whose ingenuity and labor every rough, barren hill top 

 is to become a terraced blooming paradise. Inspired with the idea of 

 the importance and capacity of an acre, and reformed from the foolish 

 ambition of possessing nothing under a quarter section, we have seen 

 many of these owners of a few despised acres roused up from a life of 

 hopelessness and idling, to energy, industry and real manly pride. 

 They find that Providence is kinder than they thought, and that they 

 have, after all, as much clear money to spend as the man who is the 



