Address. 



lambs to the butchers, hay and grain to the villages, cream to the hotels, 

 and in other ways converting not only potatoes, but all the produce of the 

 soil into human nature, for a consideration. We have ceased to have a 

 bee for the purpose of removing into the neighboring stream the manure 

 incumbering our farm yards, and our system of enriching the land is no 

 longer comparable to the farmer's cider which was so weak that the drinker 

 asked him how many barrels he made last year, and on being told fifteen, 

 replied : " If you had 'had another apple you could have made another 

 barrel !" 



The old prejudices and superstitions; which like rats in a trap, get into 

 men's minds easily, but find a great difficulty in getting out, against 

 "high farming," including in that phrase the best modes of culture, draining, 

 use of most improved implements, blooded and high grade stock, and getting 

 information from the experience of others as related in agricultural papers 

 and books, have been eradicated, and we are now prepared to go on de- 

 veloping ourselves and our farms as rapidly as possible, and we are not 

 prepared to say that we can discern the beginning of the end when im- 

 provements in agricultural processes or results will cease 



Having arrived at this point in our progress, it is time for us to consider 

 what Ave have to accomplish, not merely as farmers, but as men and philan- 

 thropists. Every man's pursuit is enoblcd, not only by the character of 

 the work he is engaged in, but by the object for which he works, and the 

 one pursuit is as respectable as another, provided it is directed towards 

 noble ends. The man who lives but to continue without any definite 

 object in existence might as well be in one business as another ; he enobles 

 none and none shed lustre on him, because his purpose is not defined. We 

 have a mission, and it is of the highest importance that we discern what it 

 is, and in what manner we can best promote its interests. 



As a nation we are an agricultural people, more so than any other peo- 

 ple in the world, and we are destined, not only to feed untold multitudes on 

 our own hemisphere, but to export food to the wanting myriads across the 

 oceaus, who even now depend upon our breadstuff's to eke out the measure 

 which falls to them from the large producing, but continually narrowed 

 fields of the old world. With a population now of forty millions, that will 

 probably be expanded to a round hundred millions before the year 1900, 

 with possessions enlarged from the original narrow strip along the Atlantic 

 coast, into a mighty empire, stretching three thousand miles across the con- 

 tinent to the Pacific Ocean, and upward from the Mexican gulf to the 



