186 AMERICAN CATTLE. 



cans are too apt to do, to try a better; and so they have succeeded 

 in establishing the best breed for their own particular uses. 



"We Americans have not, as a rule, done so. "We are enter- 

 prising, restless, shifting, more or less, in our occupations, and 

 forever changing our homes on a chance of bettering our condi- 

 tion. Hence there is little steadiness in our pursuits, even when 

 we are farmers all our lives. We breed sheep and raise wool 

 a while; wool gets low, and we abandon our sheep, to go into 

 cattle, either for beef or the dairy ; they fall in price, and we 

 abandon them, and go into mixed farming; by and by, these 

 mixed commodities become troublesome, and we think our loca- 

 tion a bad one, and sell out and try a new spot, and so on 

 through a purposeless, ever shifting occupation. This remark 

 has little to do with cattle breeding, we admit, but it gives a 

 cause, or reason, why we are not better and more systematic 

 cattle breeders. 



Yet there is a better prospect ahead. The internal communi- 

 cations of our country by railway, have become so multiplied 

 and extended that we can select our positions, and choose the 

 staples to which we can best turn our attention, and to which 

 our soils are best adapted. We can ascertain to what product 

 our capita] can be most profitably directed, and so apply it. A 

 division of labor becomes thus established. Wide districts, in 

 several States, grow wool more profitably than they can grow 

 anything else; other districts can more profitably grow cattle; 

 others the dairy ; and so on, all diversified, and each profitable in 

 itself. Such being the fact, it becomes a comparatively easy 

 matter for the cattle breeder, with a proper location, to prosecute 

 his business with a single eye to both improvement and success. 

 If he have industry and sagacity, he can soon acquire the means, 

 and happily, opportunity is not wanting to gather the material 

 to put him, at no distant time, in possession of the "best breed 

 of cattle " for his purposes. 



