20 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



Massachusetts mind, eager for self-improvement, eager for 

 the building up of a community, should in such large num- 

 bers throughout the Commonwealth be loath to praise and 

 eager only to criticize and to censure. For example: last 

 year in 1906 we passed a sliding scale law for the regulation 

 of the great gas company here in Boston, — a law, which, 

 as you know, provides that where increased earnings are made 

 for certain public-service corporations, they shall be shared 

 by the people ; that is to say, that when the company in- 

 creases its earnings, it must reduce the price of gas to the 

 public before it can increase the dividends to its stockholders. 

 That is an automatic regulation for corporations w T hich was 

 initiated, in the United States, here in Massachusetts. You 

 have never seen very much about it as a grand piece of 

 pioneer legislation in the papers of this Commonwealth, but 

 the Massachusetts law is honored outside of Massachusetts, 

 and this law is the first great step in that kind of progress 

 taken in the United States of America. This last year we 

 have seen the Governor of New York take up the general regu- 

 lation of corporations through so-called public utility com- 

 missions, — very excellent and very admirable institutions, 



— and curiously enough it suggested that Massachusetts 

 should copy that excellent institution! Why, gentlemen, we 

 have been regulating corporations for twenty-five years. We 

 don't need to copy New York ; New York has copied us, and 

 in a less effective manner than the corporations are now being 

 regulated right in our own State. 



I sometimes think in a similar fashion the public ought to 

 have been told what the farmers are doing in our State, as 

 the secretary has shown, and does every year, in his admir- 

 able report of the work of the State Board. We listen too 

 much in silence to these reports of abandoned farms in New 

 England. Why, even Cape Cod is increasing in population, 



— all built up on blueberries and cranberries ! It is worth 

 while to remember there is still a chance here, a splendid 

 chance, if we only choose to go about it in the right way. 

 The old-fashioned kind of cultivation is going out, It is 

 impossible to make money by raising hard corn and pump- 

 kins ; it doesn't pay. But if the farmer uses the same brains 



