SECRETARY'S REPORT. 35 



business, we must understand thoroughly how to manage a 

 farm. 



How to manage a farm ! Surely this is easily answered, I 

 am told. Any man endowed with ordinary physical faculties 

 and common intelligence can conduct the business of farming 

 in New England, you will say. The intricacies of business may 

 indeed overwhelm a man. The cares of a profession may be 

 beyond his management. He may be stranded ere his voyage 

 of life is half over, upon some unknown and unexpected shore. 

 But to manage a farm, how simple, how easy is the process ! 



Now is this so ? Are you not aware that as a general rule 

 our agriculture is lying torpid, in the hyperborean winter of 

 neglect and indifference. Why, gentlemen, the shop of the 

 mechanic is looked upon as of more real value to-day than the 

 acres of the farmer. The young man, who sits day after day at 

 the window of yonder little edifice, devoted to his journey work, 

 looks out with a sort of compassion upon him who, less favored, 

 passes along the road to his daily toil upon the land. Farming 

 is made subservient to every other calling. It is conducted too 

 often with less skill than any other calling ; not because it is 

 easier, less intricate, simpler, but because it is more complicated, 

 requiring quick perceptions, a steady eye, a ready hand, judg- 

 ment, foresight, thought, care, management. It is easier, let 

 me tell you, to make a shoe or a chair, than it is to raise one 

 hundred bushels of corn to the acre, or to feed a cow profitably 

 upon the crops from your own land. A gentleman once showed 

 a capitalist and merchant of Boston, a farm of five hundred 

 acres, which it was necessary for him to manage, and he 

 exclaimed that he had got intellectual labor enough before him 

 to occupy the mind of any one man. He thought his ships, his 

 stocks and insurance complicated and trying enough — but the 

 farm more than all. And have you not seen how like magic a 

 tract of territory would improve year after year under skilful 

 and well applied labor ? Have you not before your own eyes 

 the contrast between energetic and active farming, and the more 

 sluggish operations of too many of your neighbors ? 



How to manage a farm, then, is not the simplest and easiest 

 thing to do — not the simplest and easiest question to answer. 



Men buy farms indiscriminately, too often injudiciously, — 

 careful enough, perhaps, about the price, but careless enough 



