92 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



"Without doubt, one cause of the superior healthfulness and 

 longevity of the farmer has been owing to the fact that he 

 has lived in a more natural way ; he has known less of arti- 

 ficial life as it exhibits itself in style, fashion, or reaching 

 after expensive and extravagant tastes. Simplicity of life 

 and manner has ever been the characteristic of a farmer and 

 his family. Not only have the extravagances introduced by 

 our late war, and the immense development of the wealth of 

 our country, the railroad and telegraph, disturbed the social 

 and healthy condition of the merchants and financiers, but 

 the curse has crawled down into many a farmer's home. 

 And books,, and newspapers too, sometimes work many an 

 incidental evil. To many it seems a much higher grade of 

 life to wear fine clothes, sit in an office or store, give orders, 

 send telegrams, and write many letters, than in plain honest 

 and manly muscular work to earn the daily bread. The ter- 

 rible mistake has been made — oh, how often within twenty 

 years ! — of disdaining manual labor, of looking upon hand, 

 arm, and leg work as not ennobling. Ah, how many fair 

 country girls and boys have got into the slums and purlieus 

 of our cities, and gone down as wrecks, because they dis- 

 dained ordinary farm-life ! 



And what is the result of this notion? Why, that our 

 New-England farms are going fast into the hands of small 

 Irish tenants and proprietors who are not beneath work, and 

 the Yankee is running to brain and nerve, and running to 

 them so fast, that he is rapidly running his race out of exist- 

 ence : he is not leaving muscle, belly, nutritive and repro- 

 ductive organisms enough to perpetuate his kind. And the 

 overworked brains and nerves you will find stored away in 

 the palatial residences at Dan vers and kindred institutions ; 

 while the humble farmer of foreign extraction is raising 

 neat-stock and neater human stock to supply the maw of 

 the insatiable cities and large towns with its men and 

 women. 



O farmers of Massachusetts, do not forsake the simple 

 tastes and habits of the old New-England farm ! Do not 

 allow the luxurious and effeminate reachings after art, fash- 

 ion, and sensuous indulgence, to pollute your inborn good 

 sense, and inheritance of sterling Puritan stock. An old 

 philosopher once said that " many dishes bring many dis- 



