128 
STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY 
the contrast of brute physical force with the system, the fore¬ 
thought and the plans of the human brain. It is the concen¬ 
tration of labor in contrast with its aimless diffusion. 
Many a farmer who is up early and down late, who seems 
to be trying hard to do his best, fails to reach statisfactory. 
results by attempting to do too much, by too much labor and 
too little thought, by a wrong direction of his labor, by apply¬ 
ing it over too large a surface in proportion to the means he 
has at his control. He does not do all that is necessary for 
the complete success of his labors. He is perhaps ambitious 
of a large rather than a good farm, and he takes burdens upon 
his shoulders that he cannot bear. The consequence is he has 
no time for the early and minute supervision of his affairs 
which economy demands. He suffers the accidents that are 
apt to befall things left to themselves. His method is one of 
diffusion instead of the concentration of effort. He is com¬ 
pelled to let things slide. Work as hard as he may he does 
not do all that is necessary for the complete success of his 
labors. He is compelled to negligence by overwork. The 
weeds grow up in dense masses in his ccgrn and his potatoe 
patch, sucking away at the vital elements of the corn and the 
potatoe in the soil, reducing the yield from a splendid crop to 
one of only ordinary extent, ripening their seeds for another 
crop next year, and so it goes. There’s a waste, a leak in the 
potatoe field, a leak in the corn field, a leak in the orchard, 
and the biggest kind of a leak in the barn yard. 
If you talk with such a farmer from the west, you may be 
sure that he’ll maintain there is no need of manures there, that 
the soil is inexhaustible, and possibly that manures are a positive 
injury. The speaker has heard that maintained repeatedly in 
the progress of his journey hither. He replied: “Don’t 
flatter yourself, sir, with such a soothing belief. It will bring 
you to rack sooner than there is any need of.” All history 
shows that no soil is so rich as to be inexhaustible. All history 
shows that the great law of compensation is inevitable; that 
no soil is so fertile as to be able to withstand a long course of 
mismanagement and robberry. If it enriches the fathers it 
