Proceedings of the Farmers' Club. 423 



York lias a million of mouths clamoring for daily bread, and Brook- 

 lyn, ISTewark, Philadel[)lna, and the sisterhood of great and growing 

 towns around them, two millions more, we may call that man a 

 sound philosopher Avho studies how to take the greatest number of 

 bushels of potatoes from an acre of Long Island or south Jersey 

 sand. Another circumstance makes this a turning point in agricul- 

 ture. For eight years a bitter civil strife has checked enterprise 

 and sometimes blasted production over nearly half this republic. 

 That is now over and ended. In eleven great States a total change 

 in the agricultural system has begun and must go on. The God who 

 made the geology and the climate of this continent designed the 

 region fanned by the breezes of the southern gulf as the garden 

 spot of America ; and no stretch of human folly or madness can 

 avail to check the action of eternal laws. Those sunny regions are 

 open to the march of the grand army of peaceful progress. A day 

 of wiser and sounder tillage has come for those million of acres that 

 now wave with rustling sedge-grass, or give only fox and rabbit 

 coverts in their tangled and briery thickets. How do we of this 

 Farmers' Club stand related to all this prospective advance ? Mr. 

 Chairman, and gentlemen, circumstances have put it into the van of 

 this march ! Not that we know more than others. On the contrary, 

 I feel that there is hardly a solid farmer who does justice to ten acres 

 of land that cannot teach us some of the first principles of the art. 

 Our mission is not to originate, but to spread .ideas. This is the 

 ■ agricultural center, as Broad and Wall streets are the financial center. 

 When we say things here we should regard not only the ring of 

 kindly and familiar faces that are framed in these four walls, but 

 that remote, though real, audience spread all around us, from the 

 pine solitudes of Mount Katahdin, on the utmost verge of Maine, to 

 the musquito-covered savannas of western Texas ; from the everglades 

 of Arcanian Florida to the far shore " where rolls the Oregon, and 

 hears no sound save his own dashings." Mr. Chairman, as a news- 

 paper man and journalist by profession, I have investigated the sub- 

 ject, to reach this impressive conclusion — that when a remark or an 

 idea of more than ordinarj^ force and value is spoken in this club it 

 reaches an audience of two millions of readers. The evening lamps 

 in four hundred thousand dwellings shine upon the columns where 

 these reports stand in ij^Q. They are read in palaces under the 

 bravery of gilded chandeliers. They are studied out in log cabins 

 where the wind, blowing through the chinks of the punshon floors, 



