90 BOARD OF AGEICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



suioly degenerate. Forms take the place of principles, and 

 social customs destroy that interdei)endence so absolutely 

 necessarj^ for mental activity and individual advancement. 

 Money, too quickly or easily won, insures a fictitious pros- 

 perity which tears down the true standard of living. The 

 shallowness and hollowness of so-called society is being 

 pushed out into the country, spreading its miasma of con- 

 tagion, and dwarfing all true sentiments of holy living. 



All these (juestions play an important part in the discus- 

 sion of the future for the farm, for here the life of the young 

 must be closely interwoven with every thought. We are 

 discussing problems which have to do directly with the more 

 conservative class, — men slow to modify their positions, 

 and still more slow to change practices. Yet must we recog- 

 nize to-day the fact that the ruts of habit do not run along 

 the highway of progress. 



Radical changes are demanded, not in the fundamentals 

 of the industry, but in the means and agencies by which 

 these fundamentals are elaborated. The principles of growth 

 and production are ever the same, but the steps by which 

 that growth and production are secured are ever chang- 

 ing. To these changes, then, serious attention may well be 

 given. 



The free, open life of the west, with its broad areas, neces- 

 sitated the use of machinery, and gradually that conception 

 of the prol)lem has been working its way into the life of 

 New Enoland. Restricted in breadth of cultivated fields, 

 we cannot find place for the gang plow or the traction 

 engine, but the principle involved must be accepted. New 

 England agriculture, in the future, must be an agriculture of 

 machinery. Radical as arc the changes, they must be made. 

 The great problem of labor, which to-day overshadows all 

 others in the mind of the average farmer, must be solved by 

 machinery, and the lines of effort those which will return in 

 largest measure for the physical energy expended. 



Aroostook County has been the great potato-growing sec- 

 tion of the east, until the farmers of the older portions of 

 Maine came to feel that there was no possibility for them to 

 grow this crop with profit, and gradually the acreage has 



