195 BOAED OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



Perhaps some one will think I ought to tell here what branch 

 of manufactures a farmer should take home with him. My faith 

 is that an earnest, prayerful spirit is its own best guide. One wise 

 man says, "I could easier teach twenty men what it were well to 

 do, than be one of the twenty to follow my own teaching." Our 

 circumstances constrain us. Don't let them make slaves of us. I 

 would gladly take advice of a dozen or twenty of you, but after 

 all, your liberality would be best pleased to have me work out my 

 own mind. 



Butter-making is a legitimate branch of farm manufactures, 

 despite mammoth city mills, and manufacturing really good butter 

 is never likely to be overdone. The chief trouble is that a large 

 proportion of our people can't distinguish poor butter when they 

 see it. Jf it were not so how would our mistakes and the produce 

 of tallow factories be sold at all ? Every writer, now-a days, 

 allows a cow to be a machine, and the machinist and his wife who 

 own a good one or a number of them surrounded with the proper 

 manufacturing tackle and raw material, well managed, are having 

 easy times this winter, while a good many other machines have 

 run their operatives out of employment. 



It is not so much the right to make any particular thing on the 

 farm that I stickle for as the right to make every or anything 

 good the farmer can. We must claim this because it is a fact of 

 New England development over and over again that the full grown 

 manufactures we brag of sprang from an ordinary farm chrysalis. 

 Necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes necessity has 

 to reside in the country in order to manufacture wit for the town. 



I urge my village and city friends to let the country thrive be- 

 cause they are sure to find their account in it later. It is not well 

 to induce every ingenious family to leave it. I hate to see rural 

 roadsides robbed to trim city churches for a day, even at Christ- 

 mas time. If we scatter good seed in the country it is sure to 

 come to the town sooner or later in the natural current of human 

 events. 



We must take care of our big mills, of course, and we must 

 take care that they do not swallow all the little ones at one fell 

 gulp. It is enough for the big mills that the little ones exist, 

 happily, to teach economy and furnish fresh levies of recruits 

 that have been drilled to apply themselves to details in various 

 directions. Men specially trained to one idea are not wanted in 



