15 



which they will all be buried/' It is these kind of farmers who do so nauofc 

 to prevent real progress in the business, doing as little as possible themselves, 

 and attempting to discourage others from carrying out new ideas and keeping 

 up with the natural advancement of the time in which they live. You may 

 hear them like frogs in a swamp continually croaking, and the burden of their 

 refrain is that "Farming don't pay." Go into almost any district in Mew 

 England and ask the loafers, sluggards and hand-to-mouth livers, why they 

 don't go to work, improve, bring up their farms, and they will tell y©u "the 

 soil is worn out," "can't raise anything to profit," and you will find as like be- 

 gets like the more poor places and sottish farms about, the more of this laggard 

 class ; reminding one of the country trader, who purchasing goods in Boston, 

 was asked if he did not want pome half-mourning goods. "I think I will take 

 a lot," was the reply, " as many people up our way appear to be about half 

 dead." But just let a circus come along, or a horse trot take place, and these 

 dry and lazy bones will rattle along leaving the work at home half accomplish- 

 ed and to see them and hear tbeir cheery talk on the road and on the scene of 

 action, a bystander would consider them among the smartest folks around, be 

 longing indeed to that class who are born at a very early period of life. In the 

 ordinary commercial point of view, farming does not pay — that is it is not a 

 business in which great ventures can be made and riches quickly and easily 

 accumulated, and the Creator never intended, so far as we can judge by past 

 history of nations, that agriculture should be a money-profitable pursuit. From 

 the early patriarchs down to our forefathers in New England the tillers of the 

 soil have been rich only in herds and flocks, large families, virtuous homes and 

 contented with pouring out from their homes those who desiring more enter- 

 prise and luxury should build cities, navigate the ocean, start new enterprises 

 and amass wealth. Almost the only country in the world not colonized and 

 ,dttled in the interest of mammon is New England. The lust of gold brought 

 to the rest of the New World after its first discovery the adventurers whose 

 deeds of cruelty have soiled the pages of history, but the men who left father- 

 land with its homes, its hallowed lives and holy graves and lived in Holland for 

 a dozen years, and then tempted the tempestuous Atlantic in vessels not larger 

 than our coasting sloops and schooners, and landed almost in mid-winter on the 

 bleakest coast of our northern shores, welcomed only by storms, and "Indians, 

 lions, wolves," and prospective starvation, did so not to increase their material 

 wealth only — though they were manly enough not to remain a burden on their 

 ^jod Dutch friends in Holland— but to find a home where they could live as 

 free men, worship God in their own way and get their children out of the way 

 of licentiousness and too much "taking of the bit in their mouth," as the old 

 chronicles expressed what is so common in our households. 



These Pilgrims were all working men, living by their own labor in Holland 

 — Brewster who was a man of property, learning to be a printer at the age of 

 45 ; Bradford who had owned and farmed land in England becoming a silk- 

 dyer ; Robinson studying and preaching, and so soon as the season allowed after 

 their landing at Plymouth they commenced work, "digged their ground and 

 towed their seeds," and then and there was laid the foundation of a common- 



