Practical papers—sheep husbandry. 
3 21 
and now has a large amount of sheep to her agricultural area. 
Look at distracted Spain, a country whose sheep walks were once 
trod by one of the noblest races of sheep on earth, and protected 
by the strong arm of the government as a subject of wealth and 
national pride, and their exportation forbidden by law. With 
the decay of that nation has come the ruin of this industry there; 
and most of those sheep walks, where once trod this noted race, 
are now deserted or occupied by a degenerated hybrid race. As 
the eye, the ear, the head, the hand, and every limb and member 
are necessary to form the perfect man, so are all our industries 
(and this one of the important ones), necessary to an agricultural 
and prosperous people. 
WOOL GROWING IN RELATION TO RAILROADS. 
That cloud which a little while-ago was a mere speck on the 
horizon, its thundering may now be heard throughout the land, and 
agriculture and the other pursuits are marshaling their hosts for the 
struggle that lies before them, and in the language of the poet, 
“ Low murmuring sounds along their banners fly, 
Our rights, our rights, the watchword and reply.” 
For years, the railroads have been consolidating and combining, 
until the people can no longer close their eyes to the fact that the 
wealth of the producers is fast finding its way to the pockets of 
the railroad monopolists, until to-day it takes six bushels of corn 
in Western Iowa to pay the freight on one bushel to the tide¬ 
water, or, in other words, one bushel of corn for the farmer to six 
bushels for the railroads. While corn west of the Mississippi is 
being burned as fuel or transported thousands of miles to feed 
operatives with, why not cover a portion of those corn fields with 
sheep, and import the manufacturer and his operatives instead of 
their goods, and help to build up a home market? If the corn 
was fed to sheep, and the wool was shipped to New York or 
Boston, two quarts of the corn so fed would pay the' freight on 
the wool grown from one bushel of corn, thus taking only one- 
sixteenth instead of six-sevenths of the corn. Many other manu¬ 
factures are equally advantageous to build up a home market. 
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