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baronial notions, born of a great landed proprietary, with 

 its costly machinery and extravagant equipment and 

 showy methods, within the reach of opulence alone — ■ 

 its aggrandizing tendencies, its unfraternal social leanings, 

 by dint of which the haughty spirit of patronage may 

 supplant the better instinct of good-fellowship and neigh- 

 borly good-will, and Massachusetts grow to be — -instead of 

 the glorious ideal of the past, her little communities emu- 

 lating one another in their successes — knit together more 

 firmly b}' sharing one another's struggles, — instead of this 

 her little town communities merged into one great central- 

 ized, consolidated factory village, with a few rich mill- 

 owners and fancy farmers at the top and a mass' of help- 

 less, restless, discontented wage-earners looking up to 

 them without appeal, as the arbiters of their fate. 



Let me close with the hope that long before such a 

 destiny shall overtake the farmers of this county, the new 

 facilities for getting about and for the distribution of pro- 

 ducts,— the better roads we are to have — thanks mainly to 

 summer pleasure-travel and the bicycle — protected, as I 

 think they will be, by a premium offered b}^ the towns on 

 broad tires, equal in amount to the cost of the change to 

 the farmer who adopts them, — the electric railway system, 

 soon, I believe to be made more serviceable to the public 

 and more remunerative to the investors, by being applied 

 IVora midnight until day-break to the collecting and distri- 

 l)uting of freight expressage — that these and other changes 

 may make the toils of husbandry lighter and its profits 

 greater, — and that specialized products and localized 

 markets may add to the assurance with which the husband- 

 man shall sow his crops and possess his acres. So that 

 the agriculture of the county may ap})roach the opening 

 century with an unclouded future, and be what it has been 

 to us, what it was to the founders of your society — what 

 Timothy Pickering said it was, the "noblest of pursuits "% 



