CONVENTION — Conditions of Progress. 
113 
There are two claims advanced for farming on a large scale with 
large ownership; first, that more skill can be brought to it; second, 
that more and better machinery can be used in it. The pith of 
both of these considerations is the implied fact that the wealthy 
owner is more intelligent than his tenants and workmen. The bal¬ 
ance will sink on his side only by virtue of knowledge. Let skill be 
about equal, and the small farmer will have the advantage over the 
large farmer. More personal superintendence, more economy, more 
loving, pains-taking labor will belong to him. Sagacity and hon¬ 
esty combined, will easily overcome, by co-operation, the want of 
machinery, while nothing can compete with the omnipresent eye 
and hand of an owner. Let there be general intelligence among 
farm hands, and land is sure to fall to them; let them be ignorant, 
and land is sure to elude them, and they are sure to sink into a 
coarse class of servile laborers. If each farmer says to himself. My 
farm shall improve in fertility and beauty each year, the time will 
quickly come in which no man can lightly buy it of him, and no 
man wrest it from him. 
What the average size of a farm may, to advantage, be, depends 
on the products raised, and the kind of cultivation prevalent. A 
farm should be large enough to give labor and generous support to 
one family and its natural adjuncts. If farming is thorough, and 
the produce raised various, a comparatively small portion of land 
will do this. It is fortunate that skill and variety in productions 
are both on the increase with us, and that thus an extended divis¬ 
ion of land may take'place for a long time to come. We and our 
children after us have an open door of prosperity, if we know how 
to enter into it. In concluding this point of the division of land, 
we emphasize the fact that the ultimate, fortunate issue turns on 
general intelligence. The school house by the roadside is the farm¬ 
er’s Bethel, and the saloon at the corners the farmer’s bane. A 
little unwholesome fermentation in the belly will take the place of 
a great deal of wholesome fermentation in the brain. 
The second general condition of prosperity with farmers is variety 
of productions. Slave-labor and all the lowest forms of farm-labor 
are attached to coarse, wholesale production of single staples, like 
cotton, sugar, tobacco, rice; or more rarely corn, wheat or cattle. 
There are manifest evils that attend on an unvaried form of agri¬ 
culture extending over a large region. Any failure of crops, the 
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