304 



THE GENESEE EAEMEPw. 



and go when they please, is the great obstacle of 

 their speedy extermination. In fact, it \yonId not 

 be half so difficult to cope with worms as with 

 wolves, if we only understood them as well. Their 

 safety, their power, is in our heedlessness, our igno- 

 rance, or unwise despair, I have no doubt that 

 every one of them could be put out of the way not 

 only without great cost but with absolute profit, 

 apart from the advantage of being rid of them, if 

 we only knew what we might surely, though slow- 

 ly, learn with regard to their origin, habits, and 

 vulnerable points." 



VI. " One of the greatest present needs of Agri- 

 culture is a habit of recording and journalizing 

 their e'xperience for public use and benefit on the 

 part of thoroughly practical men." 



VII. We need some method for arresting the 

 alarming deterioration of the soil. 



VIII. I rank among the urgent needs of our 

 Agriculture, a more intimate and brotherly inter- 

 course among our neighboring farmers and their 

 families. I apprehend that we are to-day the least 

 social people on earth, and that this is especially 

 true of our purely agricultural districts. Tlie idle 

 and the dissipated are gregarious ; but our indus- 

 trious, sober, thrifty farming population enjoy too 

 little of each other's society. In the Old World, 

 for the most part, the tillers of the soil live in vil- 

 lages or hamlets, surrounded, at distances varying 

 from ten rods to three miles, by the lands they cul- 

 tivate and sometimes own. When the day's labor 

 is over, they gather, in good weather, on the vil- 

 lage green, under a spreading tree, or in some invit- 

 ing grove, and song and story, conversation and a 

 moonlight dance, are the cheap solace of their priva- 

 tions, tlieir labor, and their cares. But our Amer- 

 ican farms are islands, separated by seas of forest 

 and fencing, and our farmers, their families, and 

 laborers, rarely see those living a mile or two 

 away, save when they pass in the road, or meet 

 on Sunday in church. This isolation has manj^ 

 disadvantages, prominent among which are the 

 obstacles it interposes to the adoption of improved 

 jirocesses and happy suggestions. As ' iron sharp- 

 eneth iron,' so the simple coming together of neigh- 

 bors and friends brightens their intellects and accel- 

 erates the process of thinking. The farmer not 

 merely profits by the narrations of his neighbor's 

 experience and experiments in this or that field of 

 production — he gains quite as much by the stimu- 

 lus p-iven to his desire for improvements as by the 

 facilities otTered for gratifying that desire. It is 

 well that he should be enable to share the benefits 

 of others' observations and achievements; it is even 

 ■better that he should be incited to observe and 

 achieve for himself. But, more than all else, it is 

 important that he should now and then be lifted 

 out of the dull routine of plowing, tilling and reap- 

 ing — that he should be reminded that ' the life is 

 more than meat,' and that the growing of grain 



. and grass, the acquisition of flocks and herds, are 

 means of living, not the ends of life. Especially is 

 it im.portant to give more social, fraternal, intellec- 

 tual aspect to our rural econoni)^, in view of the 

 needs and cravings of the rising generation, who, 

 educated too little to enjoy solitude and their own 

 thouglits, too much to endure the life of oxen, are 

 being unfitted by their very acquirements for the 

 rural existence which satisfied then' less intellec- 



tual, less cultivated grandfathers. It is the moet 

 melancholy feature of our present social condition, 

 that very few of our bright, active, inquiring, intel- 

 lectual youth are satisfied to grow up and settle 

 down farmers. After all the eloquence and poetry 

 that have been lavished upon the farmer's vocation 

 — its independence, its security, its dignity, its quiet, 

 its happiness — there are not many decidedly clever 

 youth, even in the households of farmers, who are 

 deliberately choosing the farmer's calling as prefer- 

 able to all others. Hundreds drift or settle into 

 Agriculture because they cannot acquire a profes- 

 sional training, or because they hate to study, or 

 because they cannot get trusted for a stock of 

 goods, or for some one of a hundred other such 

 reasons : very few because they decidedly prefer 

 this life to any other. Advertise in the same paper 

 to-morrow for a clerk in a store and for a man to 

 work a farm, the wages in each case being the 

 same, and you will have twenty applications for 

 the former place to one for the latter. This fact 

 argues a great error somewhere, and, as I don't 

 believe it is in human nature, nor in that Providen- 

 tial necesity Avhich requires most of us to be farm- 

 ers, I must believe it is to be detected in the 

 arrangements and conditions under which farm 

 labor is performed. We must study out the defect 

 and amend it. When the rural neighborhood shall 

 have become more social and the farmer's home 

 more intellectual — when the best books and period- 

 icals, not only Agricultural but others also, shall be 

 found on his evening table, and his hired men be 

 invited to profit by them — the general repugnance 

 of intellectual youth to farming will gradually dis- 

 appear." 



IX. We must beautify our homesteads. " How 

 light the occasional labor and how great the suc- 

 cess with which even the humblest home may be 

 enriched and beautified, especially by Tree Plant- 

 ing, is yet but imperfectly realized. Only the few 

 can live in lordly mansions ; but roadside elms 

 which shade the lowliest cot may be as stately and 

 graceful as any that stud the park of the wealthiest 

 merchant, the proudest earl. As I am whirled 

 through our rural districts, and see house after 

 house unsheltered even by a single tree, I mourn 

 the heedlessness, the blindness, which thus denies 

 them an ornament and comfort so completely with- 

 in the reach of the poorest. The farmer who goes 

 to miU or to market may return with a sappling 

 which, once fairly planted (and it is a good hali- 

 day's work to prepare the ground for and properly 

 plant a tree) and effectually shielded from injury, 

 will be a solace and a joy to his family and their 

 successors. In a country whose forests are so rich 

 in admirable trees as are ours — where the Buck- 

 eye, the Tulip, the Elm, the Maple, the White Oak, 

 and the Hickory are so easily procured — it is a 

 shame that even one human habitation so much as 

 a year old should still be unblest by shade trecK. 

 Every school house, every church — at least where 

 land can still be bought by the acre — should behalf 

 hidden by a grove of the most umbrageous, hardy, 

 cleanly trees, and every schoolboy should consider 

 himself a debtor by at least one tree to the little 

 edifice in which the rudiments of knowledge was 

 first instilled into his understanding, until such a 

 grove shall there have been completed." 



X. In our capricious, fervid climate, we need 



