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No standard of wealth and social refinement is too high for the people 
of this country to aspire to, with industrious and temperate habits, with 
their productive fields and increasing flocks and herds, and last but not 
least, with their present system of common schools open to all, and freed 
as far as possible from the stigma of caste, where the poor as well as the 
rich may come to improve their mental natures. What if languages 
as numerous as the confusion of tongues at Babel are heard there at first, 
at last, like so many rivulets from the hill-side, they mingle into a vast 
and mighty stream, that but. one voice can control, and that 
“The English, great and glorious tongue, 
That Chatham spoke, and Milton—Shakspeare, suug.” 
No business at the present day yields a better or a surer profit than 
farming, though in this, as in other pursuits, there may be injurious 
competition. Too many in one region may enter upon the cultivation of 
the same kind of crops, producing when successful, such an abundance 
in the common market, that the price is materially lessened; and when 
not successful, all sharing alike the troubles attendant upon a failure. 
Every farmer should give attention to the raising of a variety of crops, 
at least one kind that his neighbor does not. It is- well known that till 
within a few years, farmers in this section of country gave their atten¬ 
tion almost exclusively to the culture of wheat. For several years a 
partial failure in the crop reduced them to an extremity. Farms were 
mortgaged, and every means used to get a living and still retain the 
homestead. Truly a hard lesson to be learned by experience, but in this 
case, as in most others, it was the best school master. Necessity drove 
agriculturists into the raising of a variety of crops, and the rearing of 
stock ; and now they are reaping the abundant benefit of this experience. 
We need no greater evidence of the truth of this assertion than the 
show here to-day. It speaks for the farmers of our county no mean 
encomium. No part of our State can produce finer horses, cattle, sheep, 
hogs and fowls than these. Some of them have been procured at great 
expense and trouble. To that farmer who is willing to spend his time 
and money introducing the best specimens of imported stock, and the 
best varieties of grain and fruit, belongs no small meed of praise. 
This is an age of progress—not alone confined to the dissemination of 
new theories and the blotting out of old ones in the moral, social and 
