60 Thirty-Fifth Annual Report of the 



There is no law to prevent a man's dressing up like a Harle- 

 quin's monkey and go galloping across country after a pack of 

 yelping dogs if he wants to,, nor of a couple selling their 

 daughter for an impecunious foreign title, nor of stopping an 

 idiotic woman from giving a pink tea to all the poodles in the set 

 her poodle belongs to, but when these people, not one in ten of 

 whom ever earned an honest dollar in his life, begin to talk 

 glibly of the line of demarkation between the classes and the 

 masses, and of an American aristocracy based on the European 

 plan, the senses of every sensible, patriotic man and woman from 

 Maine to California reel as with a nausea and it is about time 

 that we begin anew to preach the gospel of our ancestors, written 

 in blood and privation at Bunker Hill, at Bennington and at 

 Saratoga, lest we awake some morning and find a billionaire snob 

 crowned king of this republic. 



From society to soil is a long hark, but as all things originate 

 from the soil,, so in course of time all must return to their com- 

 mon mother. In these days we hear much of abandoned farms, 

 worn out soils and discontent with country life. Men complain 

 that life on the farm means hard work and a mere living; they 

 seem to forget that only about one man in ten, in any walk in 

 life does accumulate money or property. These put themselves 

 in the very human position of imagining every other man's oc- 

 cupation pleasanter, less laborious, more remunerative, than their 

 own, and with no ambition to rise above the level of earning a 

 day's wage abandon the soil, oftener than not to their undoing. 



In the old days, when the soil was new and rich and the 

 earth produced almost spontaneously, anybody who knew enough 

 to sow, reap and to care for could be a more or less successful 

 farmer. But we have overdrawn our account in nature's bank 

 of fertility and we have not made deposits adequate to our with- 

 drawals. Our kind and bountiful mother still has vast deposits 

 to our credit,, but she is tired of doing it all and demands 

 in no uncertain voice that if we have her help we must do some- 

 thing towards helping ourselves. Mere strength and ignorance 

 are no longer at a premium in agriculture. Science and education 

 have taken their places. 



No longer is anything that stands on four legs and gives 

 milk regarded as a cow. She must show a paying amount of 

 butter fats or go to the slaughter house. The haphazard feeding 

 of buckwheat bran and cornmeal to milk producing cows has 

 given place to the balanced ration. The oats in the north field 

 fall down and rust only once, for next year the necessary min- 

 eral matter is restored to the soil and nature does the rest. 

 The fowls no longer roost in the apple trees, neither is- the dis- 

 covery of a frozen tgg in February regarded as a phenomenon. 



