farmers complaia they are in debt ! and these debts have prin* 

 cipally been contracted by purchasing land they cannot half 

 cultivate.* In the country, rarely will you find a field which 

 will pay the labor, the interest and the taxes. By purchasing, 

 then, you impose a burden on yourself difficult to sustain. 

 Many have been impoverished, and not a few have been ruined, 

 by possessing themselves of land for which they could not pay. 

 The intelligent farmer, be lore he plunges into debt, will not 

 fail to attend to this plain question. Will the income of the in- 

 tended purchase m-jre than repay the interest, the labor and 

 the taxes? If not, you are better without the land. The pos- 

 session of more land than can be improved is a tax upon the 

 owner. 



It has been said, nor cm it be too often repeated, that manure 

 is of the first importance on a farm. Notwithstanding the vari- 

 ous ways of collecting it have been pointed out, its utility and 

 necessity urged by scientific and practical men, little attention 

 is paid to the subject by one half the farmers in the county. 

 Nothing more is provided for their fields, than what is collected 

 from their hovels in the winter, and the pens of their cows in the 

 summer. He who does not attend to this branch of husbandry, 

 is not deserving the name of a farmer. Every barn yard, after 

 being emptied in the spring, should be immediately replenish- 

 ed, either with scrapings from the streets, earth which has 

 been collected by wash, or the vegetable soil of low meadows. 

 The latter is preferable for warm, dry land. Where cows are 



* Tliis is often the effect of a pardonable pride — that liberty in which we glory — 

 liberty for every man to dispose»of his own property as he pleases, or, if he die* 

 intestate, the law divides it equally among- his heirs. In England, though tlie 

 laws do not forbid a division of their large estates, the eldest son usually pos- 

 sesses the soil and titles of his ancestors ; tlie younger branches of the family not 

 participating in the landed property. In the U. States, as the law makes an equal 

 distribution of property among the heirs, one takes the farm by paying out leg- 

 acies. Unwilling to dispose of the paternal inheritance, he commences life with 

 a burden of debt ; under the weight of which hfi is often crushed. The child 

 who inherits the homestead, is usually envied. More frequently is his tlie harder 

 lot. This law, which equalizes property in a family, is productive of one happy- 

 effect ; it preserves an equality among our citizens, not known in England ; and, 

 so long as this law shall be in force, will forover preserve us from the evils of 

 those wide extremes there experienced — overgrown wealth, and abject poverty. 



