440 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



We have received the following suggestive note from F. K. Phoenix, 

 of Wisconsin : — "Our agricultural depression suggests a familiar com- 

 parison : A young man inherits a fortune and becomes dissipated and 

 wastes away his fortune. In a lucid interval he seeks a farmer friend's 

 counsel as to how to recuperate. What does the farmer tell him % 

 'Quit your dissipation. Be sober and attend to business.' What else 

 could he tell him ? A.nd now will some one of our practical farmers 

 tell me why that advice is not as good for a dissipated nation as for a 

 dissipated person ? Dissipation is the trouble with America, American 

 farmers and workers. If they do not themselves dissipate, they vote 

 to license the many impoverishing forms of vice, crime, dissipation and 

 folly from which every farmer and worker suffers. It is all in the 

 family or nation, and for every wrong, unprofitable act done by any 

 member, all must suffer. Why is not this simple, coininoji-sense busi- 

 ness truth and the swift redeeming power of the farmers' ballot for 

 national temperance taught, especially in our farm journals and insti- 

 tutes ?" — Rural Neiv Yorker. 



FRUIT ON THE FARM. 



The Western Rural intends to keep harping upon fruit on the farm 

 until there is more fruit grown. One of our most enterprising farmers 

 and writers on horticultural and other farm matters says, that while 

 but few farmers should undertake fruit-growing as a business, with a 

 view to making money out of it, there is no farmer, whether his land is 

 rich or poor, or the area small or great, but should plant fruit for the 

 family; and, notwithstanding occasional failures and the many enemies 

 the fruit-grower must contend with, there is no other way in which, at 

 the same cost, so much of luxury can be provided for the family. 



Fruits are also healthful, and those who eat freely and regularly of 

 fresh, ripe fruits are usually free from derangements of the stomach 

 and bowels. This is not true of- fruits bought in market, which are 

 often stale and unwholesome ; but on the farm, where they can be had 

 fresh, children may be allowed to eat all they want through the season, 

 and will be benefited rather than injured thereby. A moderate amount 

 of land devoted to fruit, if managed intelligently, will furnish a constant 

 succession from the time strawberries ripen till freezing weather, and 

 a sufficiency to can for winter use, and it should be the aim of every 

 farmer to provide fruits for this succession. 



The first requisite in fruit-growing is common sense, and to see 

 how fruit-growing is managed on many farms one might think this a 



