34 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



stancG which you may have taken from a bale which had no 

 name inscribed upon it. 



I am not proposing that every farmer should hire a chemist, 

 or set up a laboratory upon his estate, in order to know what 

 liis soil will produce. He has got a cheaper and less fallible 

 test in the seed that he sows. If the little capillary mouths 

 and stomachs of the springing plants find food, and if it is 

 there they will find it, they will grow. And if it is not there, 

 they Yvill starve and die. And no farmer needs a chemist to 

 tell him this. The Priest in the story understood this, thoi\gh 

 he never read a page of Liebig's chemistry. When going his 

 annual round to bless the fields of his parishioners with his 

 prayers, he came to one whose crop seemed starved and poverty- 

 struck, and he exclaimed at once, " this field don't want 

 praying — it needs manuring." He knew that Providence does 

 not waste its miracles upon the starveling crop of a shiftless 

 farmer. And this brings me to my nest topic, and that is the 

 economics of farming. 



It seems to me that the popular notions upon this subject 

 must undergo a good deal of modification, if we ever expect to 

 be a contented or independent community, or hope to save 

 New England from being gradually depopulated of that class 

 of practical farmers which has supplied so much of its best 

 muscle and sinew. There is such a go ahead spirit at work 

 among us, such an eagerness to better our condition in a 

 moment, such a restlessness while we see any body better off 

 than ourselves, that we rarely stop to examine whether we are 

 really well off or not. 



One of the hardest lessons which a young man has to learn 

 is, not to despise the day of small things. One man goes out 

 of a village to the city, and, by a fortunate run of good luck in 

 trade, heaps up his thousands in a few years, and becomes the 

 envy of all his country cousins and neighbors. Another takes 

 his course to the West, and by a fortunate pitch upon some 

 quarter section near a future county seat or embryo city, turns 

 up, after a short time, a rich land-owner. And straightway, 

 the whole village is ready to start for Boston or New York, or 

 the Great West, in confident expectation that every body and 

 any body can grow rich if they only could be in the right spot. 

 They forget, or will not heed, the fate or experience of a score 



