268 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



sections of the nation. The same truth followed between the na- 

 tions of Europe. Portugal stood at the bottom of the list in literary 

 and in crops. The untutored Russian peasant on the far-famed 

 black soils of his country, stood about next, while at the top was 

 the canny Scotchman living on about the hardest soil of them all. 



I am making the point that the measure of the production of 

 an agricultural people is never the fertility of the soil, but the fer- 

 tility of the intellect of those who till that soil. We should not live 

 as guests of nature. Nature never meant that man should lean 

 on her, and repels it by dwarfing him as an intellectual force and 

 in the measure of his living. I have yet to learn of a people living 

 on a very fertile soil who have not in the end suffered by that very 

 fertility. This was one of the reasons, my friends, which encour- 

 aged me once again to take up life on the rugged hills and reluctant 

 soils of New Hampshire against the protests of my friends. I make 

 intelligence, then, as of primary importance in "The Management 

 of a Farm." 



The second element of importance in the management of a 

 farm to which I invite attention is the permanency of the family 

 on the farm. No agriculture will be at its best, and no state at its 

 greatest whose farm families do not root back for a generation or 

 generations, in the soil held, that does not bud in present occu- 

 pancy and in expectation to flower in generations to come. Some- 

 thing of the life of the fathers is in the homes and improvements 

 of the farm, and the spirit of their encouragement is at the home 

 portals and hovers around the family fireside. No other occupa- 

 tion gives any security for family permanency and the certainty 

 of social equality, of physical, moral, and intellectual vigor and of 

 material independence. Anchor the family to the soil, and in this 

 immortality in the family line find the encouragement for perma- 

 nent improvements. Every drain, all increment of fertility and of 

 crop yields, better buildings, landscape improvements bordering 

 around them, the creation of a home of refinement, are but the best 

 forms of heritage. Such a farm still compels action, while in- 

 herited money is an opiate to the energies. 



The camp or tent farmer, who values the farm for only what 

 he can extort for use in the pleasure of a retired life in town is 

 not a constructive but a destructive farmer, a despoiler of land and 

 buildings. He is an enemy to the higher interests of society and of 

 his family. The tenant system now coming into vogue is the menace 

 of western agriculture. The tenant is not the stuff out of which 

 evolves a great agriculture, and a great state as incentive is want- 



