FAEMING IN NEW ENGLAND. 85 



many a wearied employe would willingly submit to the in- 

 conveniences and possible privations, to which the farmer is 

 subject, to be assured of that independence which enables 

 him to control his own movements, in despite of the clang of 

 the inexorable bell or the shriek of the untiring engine ; and 

 to sleep undisturbed by fears of protested notes or rumors 

 of impending or anticipated financial panics. And to this 

 complexion must come, at last, the whole question of com- 

 parative advantage, viz. : whether it is better to seek the 

 reasonably certain comfort which may be honestly earned by 

 tilling the soil, or to risk everything for the remote possibility 

 of wealth incident to some other callings. 



But an impression prevails in the community that, at the 

 West, agriculturists can surely and rapidly acquire fortunes. 



But, even there, farming has its drawbacks, and those who 

 follow it labor under difficulties which are not within our ex- 

 perience, and which we can hardly appreciate. A farmer in 

 Kansas, formerly a citizen of our own county, raised, last 

 year, some twenty acres of corn, any single acre of which, 

 if raised by a member of this Society, would insure a larger 

 sum as a premium than could be realized in Kansas from the 

 sale of the whole product of the acre. One-half of this crop 

 he held over the year in the vain hope of an advance in price. 

 It is now worth, as appears by a recent letter, less than ten 

 cents a bushel, and no demand at any price. Another of our 

 well-known citizens, now travelling in that part of the country, 

 says in a published letter : " The farmers in the Old Colony 

 would do well to think twice before emigrating to the West. 

 It is not all poetry or profit here. Success must be pre- 

 ceded by unremitting toil and by any amount of privation." 



And the secretary of the Illinois Farmers' Association is 

 reported to have said, in a public address, that in that beauti- 

 ful State, which we have been taught to consider the paradise 

 of producers, "farmers live in houses with curtainless win- 

 dows, from whose broken panes flutter the signal rags of pov- 

 erty " ; and that, " possessed of as rich a soil as the sun shines 

 upon, seven-tenths of all its farms are under mortgage." A 

 ti£he of the opportunities for observation that have fallen to the 

 lot of your Supervisor would suffice to show that the farmers 

 of Plymouth County are not the occupants of houses with di- 



