tical question : In what wa\ T arc we to secure, with the most certainty and the 

 least delay, the improvement of our condition as New England farmers? 



The less we look abroad for help the better. The miracle that is to 

 raise us is the miracle of combined personal effort. No man's single work will 

 count for much, but the work of all shall amaze us by its effect. There is in 

 every town at least one man who feels within him the inspiration of the im- 

 provement, who knows that Xew England agriculture is only feeling the feeblest 

 dawn of its triumphant day, whose heart longs for its great and beneficent pos- 

 sibilities, and who only needs the encouragement of kindred feeling to make him 

 just such a laborer as the vineyard needs. In every county there are many 

 such. In every state there are multitudes. If we can urge these men's efforts 

 into the same channel, they will wash away the barriers that the good-old-way 

 men have built, and will spread their influence over the whole broad land, fertiliz- 

 ing as it flows, and making our hills and valleys to blossom with the flowers of a per- 

 fect agriculture, — peace and intelligence, and plenty. Let us make among our- 

 selves a brotherhood of "High Farmers, " and try, by our modesty and by our 

 success, to overcome the greatest obstacle to the improvement of our agriculture ; 

 that is, the opposition of farmers themselves. 



It is a shameful thing to say, but the one cloud that is never lifted from the 

 path of an improving farmer, that is rarely pierced by a ray of hope or encour- 

 agement, is the mean jealousy and suspicion — almost the hatred — of his neigh- 

 bors. The men who have nothing to lose and everything to gain from his 

 course, will, if he is a sensitive man, make his life a burden to him, or drive him 

 back into the rats their own wheels have trundled so long. It has been my for- 

 tune to be a farmer in three different localities. In each, I have male it a rule 

 to do what seemed best, without regard to the opinion of other people. I have 

 had much to learn, single-handed ; I have made mistakes and failures : and I 

 have made successes. Through all, I have never been without friends whose 

 sympathy and support proved an unfailing reliance ; but I also have never been 

 without enemies who have done the little they could to make me uncomfortable. 

 Even to this day, when I have grown older and tougher, and have learned to 

 fatten on opposition, and when my relations with my neighbors are friendly, 

 and even cordial, I am sure that the utter and entire failure of every agricultural 

 operation in which I am interested, would carry joy to all their hearts, — not be- 

 cause they dislike me, but because my agricultural operations represent a Hydra 

 that has come into their happy valley to consume and destroy them and their 

 wives and children ; that is to say, it is in some respects a novelty. If my 

 farming succeeds, then they will adopt it and ascribe their knowledge of it 

 to the teachings of their grandfathers, but until it shall succeed it is a heresy 

 that is worthy of (and gets) their profoundest contempt — if nothing worse. 

 In all this, my Rhode Island neighbors are not worse than my former neighbors 

 have been, and they are no worse than my Massachusetts neighbors would be, 

 if I were to come and occupy a farm in the Housatonic Valley. 



Old-fashioned farmers hate new-fashioned farming. Why they hate it 

 no man can tell, nor need we ask. That they do hate it is too plain to doubt, 



