SECRETARY'S REPORT. 



kk This Means You. — Thursday and Friday of the present week 

 will virtually decide the question whether the annual cattle-show and 

 fair of the Hampshire Agricultural Society, which for forty-one years 

 has been held at Amherst, is to be continued among the institutions 

 of the town, or be abandoned from lack of interest and public spirit. 

 For the past few years the affairs of the Society have been in any- 

 thing but a flourishing condition, both as regards finances and good 

 standing in the sight of the public, and a little more indifference and 

 neglect will place the fair among the things that have been and are 

 no longer. Now we submit that there is a serious question here 

 involved, one that is not to be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders 

 or a contemptuous ; I don't care.' The fair and cattle-show is some- 

 thing more than a display of big pumpkins and fancy patterns in bed 

 quilts, something more than the exhibition of prize chickens and 

 trotting horses, it is an index of the agricultural status of the com- 

 munity, the outward and visible sign of the spirit that dominates in 

 the various interests of farm lite. Are the farmers of Amherst and 

 the rich agricultural region that surrounds us less enterprising, less 

 successful, less public-spirited than were their fathers and grandfathers 

 before them? We do not believe it; their farms, their homes, their 

 crops, their livestock, tell a different story. But they have lost some- 

 thing of the spirit of fellowship and of emulation that in times past 

 have made the Hampshire cattleshows as successful as any in the 

 state. Individual effort for individual success, a species of selfishness 

 has taken the place of that hearty sympathy in each other's labors 

 and the prosperity of the whole that obtained in earlier days. Now 

 we believe that this is all wrong, that each man best subserves his 

 own interest by laboring for the welfare of the whole community of 

 which he is a factor. In union is strength, in the agricultural as well 

 as in the social and the political world ; farmers can learn much from 



