13 



reports, — as keenly as the stock-broker keeps tally of the 

 stock market, and prices current listed at the Broker's 

 Board. He becomes less and less self-sustaining — more 

 and more the business partner of the market-man and the 

 produce-dealer. I have known a farm in northern New 

 Hampshire where the liousehold wore home-spun, woven 

 on a hand-loom from the wool of sheep that cropped the 

 scanty herbage of that hillside patrimony. This could not 

 be seen in Essex County in our day. But probably it 

 could have been seen here at the founding of this society, 

 when Pickering and his associates were, in vigorous terms, 

 denouncing a protective tariff as hostile to agriculture, 

 and when raw cotton was sold by the pound over the coun- 

 ters of our shops, to be mixed with sheep's wool in .the 

 family spinning and weaving. If the farmer is to be the 

 independent character we have known him, bearing the 

 brunt of our historic struggles, backing our public school 

 system when it needed backing, furnishing the conserva- 

 tive element in town finance and local politics, owning the 

 soil in modest parcels, and pointed at as the model of 

 quiet ease and content and manly superiority to the grind- 

 ing ambition to be rich and great, — who stood at Lexing- 

 ton and Concord, at Saratoga and Louisburg and Ticonde- 

 roga and Trenton and fired on every field a shot heard 

 round the world, — if he is to be all this, he must maintain 

 his birthright by other means than old-school Essex County 

 farming. He must reach out for markets to be opened to 

 him by specializing his crops. He must avail himself of 

 every new facility for distribution. He must cheapen his 

 transportation methods. He must localize his sales. He 

 must organize for freights, and multipl}'^ and magnify his 

 markets nearer home where his produce can be delivered 

 fresher and cheaper. 



The cost of production is not a more legitimate element 

 of price than is the cost of distribution. I have here a 



