90 THE MASSACHUSETTS SOCIETY 



gaping at each other with a look of utter despair of ever 

 being united. And if you go into these mansions, what do 

 you see? Why, you will often find that while the good man 

 of the house and his consort are snugly provided with warm, 

 well-plastered rooms, tfie children and all the rest of the 

 family sleep about in unfinished chambers, subject to every 

 sort of exposure. And the u best room," as it is called in 

 the original plan of the mansion, there it stands, the lum- 

 ber room of the family for half a century, the select and 

 eternal abode of crickets and cockroaches and all sorts of 

 creeping and skipping things, full of old iron and old leath- 

 er, the stuffing of decayed saddles, the ragged relics of torn 

 bed quilts, and the orts and ends of twenty generations of 

 corn cobs. 



When will man learn that his true diginty, as well as 

 happiness, consists in proportion? In the proportion of 

 means to ends, of purpose to means, of conduct to the con- 

 dition in life in which a kind Providence has placed him. 

 The pride of the farmer should be in his fields. In their 

 beauty, in their order, in their product, he should place the 

 gratification of his humble and honorable ambition. The 

 farmer's great want is capital. Never should his dwelling 

 be splendid at the expense of his farm. In the farm all 

 that is surplus in his capital should concentrate. Whatever 

 is uselessly expended elsewhere is so much lost to his fami- 

 ly and his fortune. 



Want of system in agriculture leads to loss of time and 

 increase of expense. System has chief reference to the 

 succession of crops ; to sufficiency of hands, and to selec- 

 tion of instruments. As to the succession of crops, called 

 rotation, almost the only plan of our farmers is to get their 

 lands into grass as soon as possible, and then to keep them 

 in grass as long as possible. The consequence of this prac- 

 tice, for it deserves not the name of a system is to lead 

 to the disuse, or rather to the least possible use, of that 

 great source of agricultural riches, the plough. According- 

 ly, it has almost become a maxim that the plough is the 

 most expensive of all instruments. And so it is, and so it 

 must be, as the business of our farms is managed. By 

 keeping lands down to grass as long as possible, that is as 

 long as the hay product will pay for mowing, the con- 

 sequence is that our lands, when we are obliged, reluctantly, 

 to put the plough into them, are bound and matted and 

 cross-barred with an impervious, inextricable, infrangible 



