Proceedings of tee Farmers' Club. 637 



and Cultivator^ both of wlwcli started out in tlie magnaniraons enter- 

 prise of improving the soil and the mind with as much trembling 

 and apprehension as tilled the mind of Christopher Colnmbns when 

 he loosed his cable and launched on the broad Atlantic, dreaming 

 each wind and star his friend as he sailed for the shores of the west- 

 ern world. The key-note of the agricultural press then was, " Agri- 

 culture is the most honorable employment of man." And that idea, 

 properly expanded by illustrious statesmen, embraced about all that 

 was thought worthy of publication. If an agricultural address were 

 to be delivered, some governor;? ex-president, ' or some illustrious 

 judge must be the speaker. Aud we usually formed a fair idea of 

 the entertainment beforehand, as the theme usually was, " The dig- 

 nity of manual labor ; or, the transce-nclent nobility of the calling of 

 him who follows tlie plow and of her who milks the cow." Every- 

 thing of an agi'icultural nature that was put in type was of such a 

 rague and general character that a beginner could learn nothing of 

 value from it, unless he had first been taught what the tyro must 

 understand before he can perform the first and simplest operation 

 in agi'iculture. Farmers would confer together about this and 

 that, devising the most appropriate and judicious means for accom- 

 plishing a given result. But let their deliberations be brought out 

 in an agricultural journal, and the man who would read them and 

 be infiuenced by such recorded suggestions was a target for the jeers 

 of the whole town, who would point sneeringly to every broken rail 

 in the fence, to every noxious weed on his farm, to every inferior ani- 

 mal, and to every poor crop of gi'ass or grain, as an illustrious example 

 of " book farming." But, at the present day, how changed. When 

 a person is wanted to deliver an agricultural address, do they seek 

 the governor, the judge, the political demagogue, or some young 

 SAvell to portray to his hearers the poetry of agriculture and to pro- 

 claim the lionors and glories of kid gloved, morocco boot, and silk 

 velvet agricniture ? By no means. That kind of instruction is well 

 nigh played out. But the man who can tell something about his 

 vocation, who knows from experience what to do and can tell you 

 how to do it, and who does not recoil at the sight of a tow frock and 

 India rubber boots, and who can take hold of almost any farm imple- 

 ment and teach a beginner how to handle it, and who can hold up 

 hands calloused by practice, he is the man to talk on agriculture, even 

 if his sentences do not read as smoothly as the paragraphs of Blair's 

 rhetoric'. The regular frock-and-trousers farmers are the men who 



