378 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the United States is relied upon, as it is to-day, for its over- 

 proportion of the food of this planet of ours. Almost three fifths 

 of the grains, fully half of the meat supply — not to mention the 

 cotton yield — of the civilized world, are expected to be forthcom- 

 ing from this direction, and yet the New England farmer pro- 

 poses to " abandon " his share in this great field — a field wherein 

 the farmer, as a farmer, has practically no competition to meet at 

 all ! A great deal is being said about the surrender of the farmer 

 class to the appetite for other pursuits. But really it is not, or 

 ought not to be, as bad as that. If other things are equal, as they 

 should be, and if all the adjustments are true, as they should be, 

 there should always be a farmer class and always farms. And 

 while the New England farmer suffers from the American failing 

 of making farms too large, equally with his far Western brother, 

 yet his offset is that, unlike the Western farmer, he does not suffer 

 from immoderate or too numerous middlemen (handlers or bro- 

 kers), but has, or can have, his market at his door. 



The horses in Massachusetts have never yet raised the alarm 

 of famine — not even in the days of the Embargo, or in the cruel 

 times of 1812-'16, when the noble old Bay State was forced by her 

 patriotism not only to send soldiers into a war of which she did 

 not approve, but to see her own peculiar industries ruined, and 

 the only ones ruined, while the war for which she was supply- 

 ing bone and sinew stimulated every rival industry in her sister 

 States : a pelican situation, which, bad as it was, did not dishearten 

 her or make her falter in her duty. But even then the Massa- 

 chusetts farmer, who paid a dollar for his hoe, sixty cents a yard 

 for his calico, and thirteen cents for a nutmeg (not a wooden one 

 from a sister State), did not "abandon" his farm. The horses 

 then or since have not been heard from. Why, then, should the 

 State in its paternal capacity step in, announce that her farmers 

 had abandoned her farms, and offer them for sale to strangers ? 

 And, so far as the stranger is concerned, he might well ask why 

 he should be expected to buy that which is advertised as useless. 

 One can not exactly break up a farm, as one breaks up a ship, and 

 sell it for junk. At what point, one might ask, does the inter- 

 est of the stranger directly accrue ? Again, there are so many 

 ways of utilizing one's farm. It can be a stock farm, a grazing 

 farm, a dairy, a fruit, a market garden, a poultry, a seeding, a 

 nursery farm. Salt hay is cut from marshes. Cranberries grow 

 in bogs ; and if one could not raise cranberries, how about frogs ? 

 There is always a demand for the esculent hind legs of those in- 

 teresting amphibians in some seaboard city; and, indeed, our 

 political economy will not listen to any such thing as a failure in 

 demand or supply of luxuries, however bizarre, any more than of 

 necessities in their due proportions. It is related that even in the 



