16 



istry ever on him. It will not avail him to puDlisn a ten- 

 dollar analysis from a private assayer. The government 

 chemist says : "Empty out your bags here and let me ex- 

 amine their contents. If you have been swindling the farmers 

 to jail you go !" 



Are we speaking of a land naturally fertile and of a favoring 

 climate ? Not so. North Germany is a dreary plain, the 

 gravelly, sandy bottom of an ancient lake. South Germany 

 is rugged with mountains. The climate, over a good part of 

 the entire region, is damp, chilly and tormented by bleak 

 v>finds. But a persevering and intellectual people have kept 

 on learning that lesson of Mother Earth ; and she has plente- 

 ously rewarded them accqrding to their deserts. Here are 

 guide and encouragement to us poor occupants of a country, 

 that long ages ago was subsoiled by the glaciers ; and a 

 glacier, let me tell you, is a plow that subsoils a little too 

 deep, and brings all the gravel and rocks to the top. Our 

 German cousins, however, are every whit as ill off ; and yet 

 they make the crops grow. We will not sneer at our own 

 efforts. It will not do to sneer at such shows of fruit and 

 vegetables as we to-day have seen. But let us all in all 

 honesty confess that we are partial farmers, working much 

 by rule of thumb, doing some things extremely well, and fail- 

 ing childishly in others. Our agriculture is nowhere thorough 

 and well proportioned. Here is a man who will raise prize 

 strawberries, and his apple trees, hard by, will be full of cat- 

 erpillar webs. Another excels in onions, while his starved 

 potato field is buried with weeds. In these respects our 

 transatlantic friends do better. You may start from Florence 

 in Italy and walk for miles along the valley of the Arno, with- 

 out seeing a fruit tree cut by insects or a weed in a vegetable 

 bed, or a Sfjuarc yard of arable soil without some crop on it. 



