170 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



and fatal one to him who is governed by it. Ten dollars 

 will equip a man with a simple arrangement to remove 

 obstructive bowlders at a nominal price per acre, and help 

 remove the bushes that are a shame upon the pretence to 

 intelligent industry of every New England farmer who grows 

 them. My neighbors in Missouri claimed that forty acres 

 was a fair allowance of corn for a man to care for in a year. 

 At a moderate sum, entirely within the bounds of economy, 

 the average New England farm may be fitted for the use of 

 every essential machine used on the prairies of the west, so 

 that if a western farmer can handle forty acres of corn the 

 eastern farmer can. Want of time will not permit me to 

 dwell upon modern machinery. It is as tempting as it is an 

 important field. Something more is involved than the mere 

 question of economy. Man, morally and mentally, in all his 

 possibilities of culture, is in this balance. Any economy of 

 muscular energy reacts upon him. When all the energies 

 of man are exhausted in muscular labor, none is left over for 

 mental growth ; and wherever muscular energy becomes the 

 sole motive force, man is lowest in the scale of civilization 

 among the workers of the world. The habit of excessive 

 muscular labor has been found incompatible with the activi- 

 ties of the mind. The New England farmer will not be man 

 enough to balance his western brother until muscular tension 

 is relieved by the substitution of other forces to operate 

 abundant mechanism on the farm. Machinery is a sine qua 

 non in the mental and material growth of agriculture. No 

 can't comes in here to veto the free use of machinery. The 

 failure to use it is the final failure of New England aoricult- 

 ure ; and the quicker any man who cannot accept this 

 saying gets out of farming, the better for him and his 

 country. I am practising what I am preaching, and either 

 the rocks on Wilson farm that obstruct machinery are going, 

 or I am ; and, as I do not care to move, the rocks are moving 

 into unobtrusive places, and machinery is -asserting its 

 supremacy and girding itself up for a trial of strength with 

 its kindred in the west. 



I shall bo told that lalior cannot be secured for carrying on 

 broad operations on the farm. I was told so before com- 

 mencing operations on my own farm, and if I could employ 



