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amount of working capital in hand. As to the question of 

 large or small farms, I have nothing to do with it here, any- 

 further than to say, that tlie size of the farm should depend 

 very much on the capital the owner has to work it with. If he 

 has no spare capital, except his own time and the labor of his 

 own liands, a very small farm will be more profitable than a 

 large one, because he will concentrate his labor on a few acres, 

 bring them to a higher degree of productiveness and profit, and 

 save the expense incident to a large tract of land, which is 

 necessarily comparatively unproductive. 



A man who has little more than his own hands, who has not 

 the ready means to hire extensively and the capacity to direct 

 hired labor so as to get the greatest return for it, will make far 

 more by concentrating his time and his fertilizing materials 

 upon five acres than he would to spread them over a hundred. 

 He can cultivate and manure and manage three to five acres well; 

 if he attempts much more, a part of it must be neglected, and 

 its returns will be small compared with what they should be. 

 Isn't that so ? Does not every day's observation prove it to be 

 so ? Do not the illustrations of concentrated labor which 1 

 have already given prove it to be so ? And if those are not suf- 

 ficient, let me allude to one or two others. 



There was a mechanic in the town of Haverhill, a carpenter, 

 who found that his health was suffering in consequence of his 

 close application to that kind of work, and he went and bought 

 a little place in the outskirts of the town and began to raise 

 vegetables for the market. It was but a few acres, scarcely 

 enough to be called even a little farm. He cultivated well, of 

 course, and manured very highly, keeping an exact account of 

 all his operations. It is needless to say that he made money, 

 more, by a large per cent, tlian he had made by his trade, and 

 he was able to show how he did it. It was by stuffing in the 

 manure, by deep and constant tillage, by an absolute freedom 

 from weeds and waste places, by making the most that he knew 

 how of every foot of land that he gave his attention to. 



Now, the fact is, farmers do not, as a general thing, do as 

 well as they know how. Why ? Because, in a vast majority 

 of cases, they can't. They have so much land, all of which 

 demands more or less of their attention, that they are compelled 

 to come far short of even their own ideas of what ought to be 



