HERDS AND FLOCKS AND HORSES. 39 



our houses and the everlasting gratitude of the owners of coal 

 mines, coal merchants and vendors of warmth producers. 

 Well, they have had a pretty good inning and deserve a well 

 earned rest. 



Now let us look for a moment upon improvement in an- 

 other direction, and which has more to do with the welfare 

 of the peoples of the earth than anything, is more necessary 

 than anything else, and, in short, the first and foremost of all 

 things to be considered "food" and that part of it more 

 particularly which we call "meat" animal flesh. 



Without food the world could last but a few days, and with- 

 out its chief essential, meat, but a comparatively short time 

 longer, and that time would only be long enough to allow the 

 human race to dwindle, dwarf and die, even the strongest, most 

 robust and most rugged of them. 



The weaker and the less vigorous would wither and die like 

 flies at the end of summer, or like a rose denied the warmth 

 of heaven, the air of the glorious day, the refreshing dew of 

 night, and its natural food from the generous soil of the 

 earth. 



Man has become what he is, from a diet of his natural 

 food, meat, and though omnivorous in his habits, and able in a 

 measure to maintain himself for a season upon the fruits of the 

 field, still without the basic principle, the brain, bone and 

 muscle producer, meat, he could neither maintain nor reproduce 

 himself to the same standard of physical, constitutional and 

 mental excellence in which he is found in our time. 



The question of stock raising in America today, is of such 

 momentous importance that it will have to be pushed forward 

 along such lines and pursued by such methods as will 

 eventually make it the very foremost industry of the nation. 

 The time is coming and is near at hand, when the youth of this 

 country must turn his attention from the allurements of the 

 towns, the follies, frivolities and the nothingness of lives spent 

 in vice-gorged cities hunting for the elusive dollar which 

 cometh not, and get him back to mother earth, the soil, the 



