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our farmers, and prejudicial to their interests ; — we mean the prac- 

 tice of permitting our teams so often to lie idle. It has grown into 

 a proverb with the English farmers, that if a farmer does not keep 

 the plough going he will fail. To every single or double team in 

 English farming a ploughman or driver is attached, whose sole bu- 

 siness it is to take care of his horses and keep them always at w^ork. 

 In general, on farms where labor is hired, if the farmer can afford 

 to keep a team he can afford to keep a teamster, who should be 

 constantly employed with that team ; ho should no more consent to 

 let his team lay idle day after day, than to let his hired men lay idle 

 day after day. We should therefore plough much much more land 

 than we do ; and when the team is not otherwise occupied it should 

 at least be employed in procuring and carting to the compost heap 

 materials for manure ; or in removing stones, or in carting gravel 

 on to meadows, if that is deemed the best method of reclaiming 

 them ; or in other purposes, which the circumstances of the farmer 

 may suggest. At any rate as a yoke of oxen or a horse cannot be 

 kept but at very considerable expense, their labor should not be 

 lost, where, as in most cases, it is possible to apply it. This can be 

 best done by having a man, who shall be attached to a team, and 

 whose business it shall be, except in cases of extraordinary demand 

 for his labor in other services, to employ this team. 



The gains ot husbandry, even under the most successful cul^ 

 tivation, must be small, and in our system of farming must arise 

 from small sales and small savings. But if the gains are small the 

 risks are proportionably small ; and if there are none of the extra- 

 ordinary and splendid accumulations there are none of the painful 

 anxieties and the extreme risks of commercial life ; and men are 

 secure from those habits of inordinate speculation in which if they 

 do not, as is very com.mon, in the end lose all their property they 

 too often purchase success at the expense of all honor and principle. 

 We have often heard it remarked by intelligent merchants in Bos- 

 ion, that of those engaged in trade from one cause or another more 

 than three fourths become bankrupt or die insolvent. We have no 

 doubt of this fact ; and it ought to restrain the anxiety and morbid 

 ambition which prevails so generally among parents, to place their 

 children in trade and to bring them up in the expensive habits of 

 city life. A good farm well managed will yield a fair compensation 

 for labor ; and there are no situations among us more truly inde- 

 pendent than that of the man, who, to the advantages of a well 

 managed farm, adds the profits of some handicraft trade, which gives 



