ADDRESS. 



THE NEEDS OF NEW ENGLAND AGRICULTURE. 



That which must interests the New England farmer of the present day, 

 is to know how he shall keep even with the world. Not how he shall pay 

 his bills at the end of the year and start again from the point at which he 

 started twelve months before, and with a fair chance of standing twelve 

 months hence where he stands now ; —but how, as the world moves, he 

 shall move Avith it ; how he shall be in all respects as much better off at 

 the end of each year as the merchant or professional man is. By what 

 means life is to be made easier, more civilized and more human with him 

 as it is with men of other occupations. He is at least eager to know — if 

 he is too old for much improvement for himself — how he may secure the 

 desired benefits for his children. 



One thing he may understand at the outset : — what is called the "good 

 old way" will not help him. Indeed, if we measure it by its results we 

 shall see that the good old way is a very bad old way ; and we shall come 

 to think that it is only when a farmer comes out of the beaten track, and 

 risks something, that he has a chance of bringing to the end of his day*, 

 — anything but a sort of human ox, working in his daily yoke, and chew- 

 ing his daily cud of old-time ideas,— pulling on the "n^ar' , side or on the 

 "off" as his father taught him to do in the beginning, and as he has set 

 his heart on doing for evermore. It would be becoming in me, perhaps, to 

 =3v, in deference to the class of which I speak, —and to continue a fiction 

 that is as old as farming itself, — that, I have a profound respect for the 

 sturdy yeomanry on whose brawny shoulders rests the great fabric of out 

 civilization ; that I consider their occupation the most noble of all occupa- 

 tions, and* themselves the most intelligent and the most honorable of all men. 

 If I were not a farmer myself and did not live behind the scenes ; if I did 

 not know the farmer class as well as a boy knows his own brother, then I 

 might fall in with this threadbare palaver, and seek favor through a flattery 

 that would fall fur short of deceiving its hearers. 



