354 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
MAY 31 
FARMERS’ CLUB—DISCUSSION. 
Why New England Farmers Suffer. 
A. T. T., Franklin Park, N. J.—The 
causes assigned for the depopulation of the 
rural portions of several of the New Eng¬ 
land States are many and varied. That 
offered by L. H. R. on page 854 of last 
year’s Rural was probably nearer the 
truth than any other recently presented. 
Having been formerly a Vermont man, 
although writing from Fort Atkinson, 
Wis., he ought to know whereof be spoke. 
He avers that “we in Vermont are no 
nearer a market in regard to the cost of 
transportation than the farmers of the 
Western States.” This is a serious reflec 
tion on the management of the railroad 
system of the New England States; but 
the present situation apparently confirms 
the assertion. Within a few miles of pop¬ 
ulous centers the agricultural communities 
in those States are unable to secure trans¬ 
portation for their products to these mar¬ 
kets at freight rates as low as those granted 
by the great trunk lines on Western pro¬ 
ducts hauled a distance of over a thousand 
miles more to the same destination. The 
existing rates on the New England roads 
illustrate the spirit which prompted the 
railroad magnate to say : “ We charge all 
the traffic will bear.” In sporting phrase¬ 
ology, however, the New England managers 
have “seen him and gone one better.” for 
they have not only charged all the traffic 
will bear, but have “charged it to death.” 
The New England States are full of in¬ 
dustrial centers. Their manufacturing in¬ 
terests have a high and widespread reputa¬ 
tion, and have built up cities populous 
enough to afford profitable markets for all 
the agricultural products raised within the 
States. The cities and towns harbor no 
prejudice against the products of the sur¬ 
rounding country, so that they would not 
deliberately boycott them and seek else¬ 
where for their supplies. It is simply a 
question of price. The freight rates of the 
Vermont or New Hampshire farmer are so 
great that be cannot sell'to them as cheaply 
as the Kansas or Wisconsin man can, in 
spite of the fact that he is a thousand miles 
farther away, all on account of the lower 
freight rates he secures. Of course, the 
Eastern farmer is a specialist, or nearly so. 
His soil is not infertile as a rule : but it is 
rough. It is covered, however, with a ver¬ 
dant growth of as nutritious grass as 
grows on the continent. The dairy cow or 
sheep is in its “element” while roaming 
about on these upland pastures ; therefore 
the New England farmer is a specialist, 
and grazing is his specialty. He does not 
plow and sow and reap in competition with 
the Western grain grower ; but his butter, 
cream and mutton, as good as any in the 
world, reach out for a market, and no 
market is at hand. And why ? Simply 
because heavy freight rates bar him from 
the neighboring cities, and consequently 
turn him out of home. 
The fact that Western butter finds ready 
sale in New England markets is no evidence 
that the same class of butter can be made 
cheaper on a Western farm than on the hills 
of New Hampshire or Vermont. 
Water and grass, two of the most impor¬ 
tant requisites for the production of gilt- 
edged butter, are in abundance on these 
green hillsides. The Western dairy farm 
does not surpass or equal them in these 
paramount essentials. All the conditions 
then exist in the East for the manufacture 
of a superior article; but when the farmer 
is ready to ship his goods, the railroads in¬ 
terpose what is practically a prohibitory 
tariff, and say “We will not carry your 
stuff unless you pay us so and so. The 
charge is nearly equivalent to confiscation 
we know, but if you do not like our rates 
you are at liberty to select any cheaper 
route you may find.” There is no competi¬ 
tion, no cheaper way, robbery is legalized 
and the shipper may pay or quit the busi¬ 
ness. The latter alternative would seem to 
be the one he has chosen. No wonder that 
the depopulation goes on, but the cause of 
it is a burning shame. 
r, N.-Y.—Just one word more about the 
abandonment of New England farms. It 
now appears that the movement began in 
1837 and has been going on ever since. 
Fully 60 per cent, of these farms were left 
before the war. Many of them never 
should have been settled and never would 
have been could the early settlers have 
known the extent and character of this 
country. 
The" Mole—a Friend or Enemy. 
A. C. B., Rockville, Ind.— In the R. N.- 
Y. for May 10, Mr. F. H., Climax, Mich. t 
declares that he is out with the mole ; that 
the pest does “much mischief—eats peas, 
potatoes and tulips,” and, in short, that 
he does many mean things. Is F. H. sure 
that the mole lives on such vegetables—is 
gramnivorous instead of being insectivor¬ 
ous ? Still the accuser has never examined 
the stomach of the accused to learn if he is 
right. I am sure he is wrong; he has 
not studied the mole; he gives the animal 
credit for much that he does not do. His 
peas are eaten by ground mice that have 
followed the mole. His potatoes have been 
burrowed into by the May beetle grub. 
His tulips were eaten by grubs or mice. 
The mole is classed by zoologists as strict¬ 
ly carnivorous, and if our friend will ex-' 
amine the structure of his jaws and teeth he 
will satisfy himself that he is wrong and 
will not blame the mole for the injury done 
in his garden. He will see at once that the 
mole could not have eaten into a potato. 
“He is not made that way.” He is our 
friend, and while he may do us some dam¬ 
age as our pet house dog may, still he 
amply repays us by the good he does. In 
his travels through our lawn, garden and 
flower beds he is after the white grubs, his 
best food, and our worst enemies. He opens 
his trench so that they may fall into it, and 
retraces his steps in it to find and destroy 
them. It farmers and gardeners destroy 
the mole, skunk, blackbird and such in¬ 
sect-eating friends, they will be sorry for 
having so got rid of their friends, and se¬ 
rious injury or the entire loss of their crops 
will punish them for such foolish work. 
G. R. W,, Lyndon, Ky.— Recently L. M. 
W., Covesville, Va., asked how to poison 
moles, and by the answer given one would 
thiuk that moles did not eat seeds ; also, in 
looking in a back number I found that the 
RURAL quotes some noted authority. Now, 
with the experience I have had with moles, 
I can’t see how any one who has taken the 
trouble to examine one can say that moles 
are not destructive to vegetation. Since 1 
saw the Rural’s answer to the question I 
planted a row of peanuts, and on looking 
at them this morning, I found that every 
peanut was eaten, there being a mole bur¬ 
row the entire length of the row. Why, I 
have had as much as five acres of corn liter¬ 
ally destroyed by moles, and on killing 15 
of them, and holding a post-mortem exam¬ 
ination, I found that they were chock-full 
of corn. If the authority quoted by the 
Rural found no vegetation in the moles 
he examined it was because there was no 
vegetation about. Now for a remedy: if 
L. M. W. will take three table-spoonfuls of 
flour, half a tea-spoonful of sugar, and as 
much strychnine as will lie on a 10-cent 
piece, and mix these with water to the con¬ 
sistency of dough, and roll the mixture 
into pills half an inch in diameter, and 
drop one in each burrow, after having made 
a hole into it by using a sharp stick, being 
careful not to disturb the burrow, he can 
kill the pests, as they are very fond of such 
delicacies. 
The R. N.-Y. does not care to dispute 
such positive assertions. It has had its say 
and would say the same thing over again 
upon occasion. 
A Use for the Hoe. 
J. A. F., Terre Haute, Ind.— 
Among the editorials appears this sen¬ 
tence: “The more we farm the less we are 
inclined to think of the hoe as an aid in 
field culture.” As a general proposition, 
this is, without doubt, correct ; at any 
rate the Western farmer will agree to it. 
The cultivation of ordinary crops must be 
done at a minimum of cost. A place, how¬ 
ever, where the hoe can be used to advan¬ 
tage was suggested to me by a farmer, and 
it is where most farmers would object to it, 
viz., in the thinning of corn. This farmer 
has grown hundreds of acres each year for 
perhaps 30 years past, and is not likely to 
adopt any method which does not pay, and 
the reason for his suggestion is obvious. 
His plan is to plant the corn thicker than 
it should stand and then thin out with the 
hoe. This gives a perfect stand, and this 
means a yield of several bushels more to 
the acre than that of corn as ordinarily 
planted. The average yield of corn to the 
acre in the U. S. is about 26 bushels. That 
this is an extremely small amount per acre 
is shown by the following calculation : At 
the rate of one stalk 15 inches from the 
next in rows feet apart there will be 
9,670 stalks to the acre. A yield of 26 
bushels to the acre would allow to each 
stalk one ear, a trifle over three ounces in 
weight, while an ear weighing 12 ounces— 
a size not uncommon with us—would give 
104 bushels to the acre. The question is— 
how is it possible to raise so little as 26 
bushels or less to the acre ? Well, there 
are many reasons for the short crops that 
reduce the average to this small figure; but 
perhaps as important a cause as any is a 
defective stand. This occurs mostly for 
two reasons—poor seed and an adverse sea¬ 
son. The vital question, then, is how to 
remedy the defective stand. It cannot be 
well done by replanting the gaps in the 
field, and the only sure way is the one 
suggested—to plant an excess and thin out 
to the right stand. 
H. F., Clyde, N. Y.—Is it a disgrace for a 
professional man to admit that he can’t 
answer a plain, practical question ? I am 
prompted to this query by what the Rural, 
with perhaps unintentional sarcasm, calls 
an “answer” by Dr. W. J. Beal, to the 
question on “ The Succession of Forests” on 
page 269. The question is one that I have 
wondered over many times, and I was dis¬ 
appointed to find, instead of an answer, an 
evasion. The conditions, it seems to me, 
were plainly stated, and while scientific 
explanations of such subjects are not de¬ 
sired by the majority of farmers, plain, 
easily comprehensible answers are appreci¬ 
ated. My confidence in a “ professor ” or 
“doctor” or any other titled dignitary is 
materially lowered by such “answers.” It 
seems to be a hard matter for some of the 
professional gentlemen connected with our 
agricultural colleges and experiment sta¬ 
tions, to use plain, every-day English that 
farmers can readily understand. They too 
often parade the information that they are 
paid for imparting to the farmers in lan¬ 
guage that the latter cannot understand. 
The majority of farmers are not scientists, 
and scientific language is lost upon them. 
Any professor that cannot comprehend this, 
and cannot or will not say he doesn’t know 
when he really doesn’t, is not fit for the 
position he holds, and should give place to 
some one who can and will. 
THE OTHER SIDE. 
Liberal Quotations were given last 
week from Andrew Carnegie’s discussion 
(published in the N. Y. Tribune) of the 
question “How to Win Fortune.” The 
Tribune now presents us with the views of 
well-known college graduates on the other 
side, from which we quote some of the most 
forcible statements. According to Mr. 
Carnegie, if a young man intends to 
devote himself to business or farming after 
graduation, or if he is not actually prede¬ 
termined toward a profession, he is actually 
jeopardizing his future success by a college 
training. 
It is only within a few years, says 
Chauncey M. Depew, that the college 
man has thought it comported with his 
dignity to go into business. Business and 
commercial success now so completely 
dominate the public judgment and imag¬ 
ination that it has dwarfed the Cabinet 
Minister and United States Senator so that 
their personality, movements and opinions 
are no longer potential and hardly influen¬ 
tial. Even the leaders of the bar and the 
most eminent men in the pulpit do not now 
have, comparatively, anything like the 
social position and leadership which they 
had a quarter of a century ago. The road 
to distinction, social consideration, and 
often wealth was formerly through the 
professions. New it is through business. 
The great bankers, merchants, manufact¬ 
urers and masters of transportation form 
the real leadership in every community, 
and the struggle is for their recognition 
and a place beside them. 
The question, as Mr. Depew understands 
it, is whether, with equal health, talent, 
energy and special capacity for success, the 
boy who began sweeping the floor or work¬ 
ing in the shop at 14 will beat in the end, a 
boy who has the advantages of a college 
education. In other words, have the eight 
years passed in the preparatory school and 
the university, acquiring many things 
which would be useless in the factory or 
store, been thrown away ? His observation 
leads to directly the opposite opinion. The 
college-bred man, under equal conditions 
of capacity and health, has a trained in¬ 
tellect, a disciplined mind, a store of infor¬ 
mation and a breadth of grasp, with the 
fearlessnesswhich it entails, that enable him 
to catch up and pass his rival. The tech¬ 
nical schools, whose usefulness is admitted, 
are proofs of this. Trained ability takes 
the lead ; and the technical school gives in 
a certain sense a university education. It 
is the old question of the trained boxer, 
runner, athlete, debater, soldier, as against 
unskilled strength and courage. Whatever 
the popular delusions, in the trials there 
never has been but one result. 
Seth Low, the gifted young president of 
Columbia College, was next interviewed by 
the Tribune. The effect of a college educa¬ 
tion, in general, he said, is to develop the 
mental powers roundly, and, if Mr. Car¬ 
negie’s conclusion is correct, it simply 
means that business offers no opportunity 
for a roundly developed man. No doubt the 
business man iu a certain aspect is a spe¬ 
cialist, precisely as the man of science is a 
specialist, but if Mr. Carnegie’s conclusion 
is indeed, as he claims, justified by the 
facts, the business man, of all specialists, is 
the only one who is injured by a well- 
rounded education before he begins to spe¬ 
cialize. Mr. Carnegie warns the yopng man 
to beware, first, of drunkenness, second, of 
speculation, and, third, of lack of concen¬ 
tration. In other words, to be successful in 
a business career, a man, whether he is a 
college graduate or not, must give his 
whole heart to it, and overcome whatever 
obstacles lie in his way. It is not many 
weeks since a prominent railroad manager 
was quoted to President Low as saying 
that for the purposes of railroading a 
college-bred man was a thousand years 
ahead of the man who had no such training. 
The reason he gave for this assertion was, 
that to the college graduate you could state 
principles, and having a trained mind, be 
would apply them himself. To the other 
man you were obliged to say, “ Do this or 
that”—a process which involved much 
closer oversight and much more explicit 
instructions. If it be true that a general 
education unfits a man for success in a busi¬ 
ness calling, it relegates business in all its 
allied forms to a position distinctly below 
all other specialties. As one who has him¬ 
self been a business man, President Low is 
distinctly unwilling to assent to this con¬ 
clusion. His own impression is that while 
it is harder for a college graduate to get 
started in business than for one who enters 
it as a boy, in five years from the time he 
does start, other things being equal, the 
college graduate will be the peer in business 
of his friend who started as a boy; and 
that while equally successful in business, he 
will fill a much larger place in the commun¬ 
ity than the one-sided man can hope to fill. 
James N. Alexander, the vice-president 
of the great Equitable Assurance Society, 
and a graduate of Princeton, said that 
nobody would be rash enough to claim that 
every college-bred man would make a suc¬ 
cess in business. He believed it was Presi¬ 
dent Eliot who said : “ You cannot make a 
$2,000 man out of a two-cent boy by send¬ 
ing him to college.” But the training of 
a college life, even for the non-studious, is 
invaluable. President Patton, of Prince¬ 
ton, speaking of the healthful disciplinary 
influence of the college atmosphere confess¬ 
ed himself almost ready to believe that “ it 
was better to have gone and loafed, than 
never to have gone at all.” So, far from 
college education being fatal to business 
success, there are thousands of practical 
examples of the contrary. And if the 
direct benefit be great, how beyond all esti¬ 
mate is the indirect benefit of education 
upon labor. What would either the far¬ 
mer or the artisan be without chemistry 
without geology, without physics, without 
mechanics, without the contributions of 
scientific study ? It is a favorite strain 
witb some men—men of force, too, some of 
them—to disparage classical education. In 
this era of varied knowledge and research, 
it would be folly to advocate the universal 
study of the dead languages. It would not 
be wise, even, to urge every one to go to 
college. There is fitness in everything. A 
college education is obviously unnecessary 
for the boy who aspires no higher than to 
be a handy workman, and whose aptitudes 
or means do not justify ambitious aspir¬ 
ations. 
“I did not suppose,” said Ex-Mayor 
Hewitt, who was next questioned in answer 
to the request for his opinion upon the 
value of an education for the business man, 
“ that the value of an education was open 
to controversy. I most decidedly do not 
consider that the chief end of man is money 
getting.” 
“ Do you think, Mr. Hewitt, that a man 
who obtains a college education can reach 
success as readily and surely as a young 
man who plunges immediately into busi¬ 
ness ?” 
“What do you mean by success? Cer¬ 
tainly I will not admit that mere wealth 
is success. In my own case I have tried all 
my life to do my duty. If in the course of 
that I made money, I rejoiced. If I lost, 
and I lost money as frequently as I made 
it, I bore that with equanimity. I have 
given my children the best possible educa¬ 
tional advantages. I am not trying to leave 
them wealth, nor do I care whether their 
