No. 4.] RURAL PROCiRESS. 135 



too many communities in New England where the glory is 

 departed. Not only has the industry decayed, but the whole 

 social and moral atmosphere has deteriorated. 



But I don't want to dwell any longer on this side of the 

 picture, because my own point of view is absolutely that of 

 optimism and of hopefulness. New England agriculture is 

 not in such bad lines as many people would have us sup- 

 pose, and I believe that the tide, however far it may have 

 been running, has turned, and that, while we have before us 

 a problem that is difficult, it is capable of solution ; for, 

 even if these things are true, they form an argument for a 

 campaign for rural progress. 



To my mind, the first and most important reason for hope- 

 fulness is the New England market. Nothing since I have 

 come into New England has so impressed me as the fact of 

 your unsurpassed markets. There is scarcely anything to 

 equal it in the United States. You have at your doors a 

 market made up of the very best classes of consumers, who 

 cannot get the bulk of their supplies from a long distance at 

 a reasonable figure. There are in New England, according 

 to the census, three and a half millions of people living under 

 urban conditions, — all of them practically non-producers 

 of things that groAV from the soil. They must be fed. And 

 you have within the Ijorders of your cities not only these 

 large numbers, many of whom are well-to-do, with a high 

 standard of living, but you have in all yonr manufacturing 

 cities the very best class of consumers of your products, — 

 the well-paid artisan. The market the New England farmer 

 has at his door is, to my mind, the key to the agricultural 

 situation and the most hopeful thing about that situation. 



Then we have all over New Eno-land an increasino- number 

 of good farmers. Meeting, as I do, men from different parts 

 of New England, and dipping into the agricultural press 

 every little while, I keep running across instances of some 

 man who has adapted himself to the new situation, and is 

 making such a success financially from a small area of land 

 as would simply startle a farmer in the middle west. A 

 couple of years ago a gentleman took me to see a farm of 30 

 acres. An Iowa man wouldn't call it a farm. The man had 



