20 
WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
permanently successful by giving due attention to the claims 
of each element and seeking to harmonize them all. 
Here, as in everything else, selfishness and a blind greed are 
bad guides to follow. They may flourish for a season, but 
there is a law that in the end they shall defeat themselves; and 
that law is inexorable. It is illustrated when we see a second 
or third merchant of a particular class establish himself in a 
village where one, and but one, could do a thriving business. 
We see it when a second cheese factory is established in a 
community barely able to give the first one a liberal support. 
We see it illustrated when the farmers of a community or 
state all rush pell-mell into this branch of farming or that, and 
then rush out of it in the same headlong, senseless manner. 
One wquld suppose that when an intelligent farmer saw all 
his neighbors and everybody’s else neighbors turning their ex¬ 
clusive attention to pork-raising, that it would be a good time 
for him to raise corn, meanwhile omitting nothing essential to 
steady and uniform success. But observation proves that such 
men are rare, and the result is that very scon everybody has 
more hogs than his own crops will supply, and corn has gone 
up quite beyond reach for profitable feeding. If the great 
majority do not then become disgusted with the low price of 
pork, £ell off, or give away, their breeders, and all go into corn, 
because that pays, they will constitute one interesting excep¬ 
tion to the general rule. 
The writer once knew a farmer in Ohio who started out un- 
der the guidance of this rule: always to do just what his neigh¬ 
bors pretty generally did not do. He was not far from being a 
philosopher. The neighbors are still plodding and grumbling. 
The philosopher has added farm to farm, owns his thousands in 
bank stock, and finds no difficulty in keeping his temper. 
Another farmer of our acquaintance has flourished nearly as 
well in the practice of doing what his neighbors did, but doing 
it first. He was the leader of fashion in agriculture, and was 
always ready to discard the model he had given them about 
the time the majority had adopted it. 
