Live Stock Breeders' Association. 269 



ing. In my own farm has been absorbed much of the lives of my 

 ancestors back to the woods from which one of them wrung it. It 

 is to memory dear. Sentiment holds me to it, and out of it I am 

 determined to evolve a farm in scope and character adequate to 

 maintain a sturdy and cultivated race of men and women. I know 

 of no way to serve the family and the state better. 



Thirdly. Our farm management should align itself up to the 

 very hair with all those modern forces and their results that char- 

 acterize the twentieth century. 



What especially marks the industrial life of this century? 

 Two things — its depth and breadth. Science and art in other in- 

 dustries exhaust themselves in the effort to secure all the possibili- 

 ties that lie in each unit handled, and to handle all the units possi- 

 ble. Witness the great economies introduced into the manufactur- 

 ing enterprises, and the saving of that which but yesterday was 

 waste. The profit per unit turned out is today less than ever before 

 in history, yet great profits and a high or costly plane of living is 

 secured through the vast volume of units turned out. Scanning 

 the decades, we find that the arts resting on the free use of mechan- 

 ism are selling their products at constantly decreasing costs, 

 amounting, in many cases, to but a mere fraction of old-time hand 

 craft rates. On our part as farmers, in an age of great captains 

 of industry, we follow the bugle notes of small farming, and are 

 ever selling crops at advancing rates. We buy for less, sell at 

 higher rates, and complain that farming does not pay. Our boys 

 seek the town, both in the east and the west, for broader oppor- 

 tunities. These boys will not and should not remain on the farm 

 until it can be made to yield the cultivated living secured by the 

 better class of industrialists of our day, and find in the farm op- 

 portunities for mental activity and recognition common to those 

 industries requiring intelligence and capital. 



When thirteen, nearly fourteen, years ago, my father's hands 

 began to drop by his side, I had to decide whether I should still be 

 led by the boy's dream and take up the thread of life again on a 

 granite hill farm of a back railroadless town, 4V-> miles from a 

 railroad and fifteen miles from any market. In eighteen years of 

 absence the farm had gone badly to bushes and woods, and its 

 buildings to decay. No field would cut a ton of hay, many would 

 not cut more than one-fourth to one-tenth ton to the acre. None 

 of the land was under the plow. Farms around it were selling at 

 $10.00 per acre, a mere fraction of the cost of improvements on 

 them. A meager living for hard work was had out of them. The 



