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57 they ought to be the food producers of the world. They are the seat, he says, of excessive vegetable, as the continents of the Eastern hemisphere are of the noblest animal, development. Let us, then, rather set ourselves to carry out the grand design of Nature than to go against it. I am tired of the stories about Western farmers burning their corn. Let the dry-goods clerks be set to work on the railroads and canals to bring it to the seaboard, then. With butter at sixty cents and beefsteak at forty cents a pound, and flour at eighteen dollars a barrel, as they are in Boston at this present writing (May 1868), it is absurd to say that we are producing enough for home consumption and for exportation too. Many and many a poor family have given up butter and sugar and juicy meat within these last eight years. The fact that a paper dollar is but two-thirds of a gold dollar cannot account for provisions being two or three times their former price. No, the real trouble is that the American hates farming and loves trading, partly because he is physically undeveloped, and therefore physically lazy; partly because farming is lonely and stupid, and without any of the stimulus of human companionship to which his childhood at the district school accustoms him; partly because at that school he got no knowledge nor love of nature, but only the trading ideas instilled by six years of drill in the dollar-and-cent examples of the arithmetic; and last, though not least, because farming kills his wife, takes all the bloom, flesh, and vitality away from her at forty. Very often, even if she can afford one, she cannot get a servant; so that she is in truth, next to an Indian squaw, the greatest drudge on the American continent.

Now it seems very strange that, when manufactures and commerce are so largely carried on by companies, agriculture should still proceed altogether, or nearly so, on the old plan of each man for himself; and I cannot but think that this is the reason why, as compared with any other way of making money, it is hard and distasteful to the American. Our public schools accustom children to work and play together toward identical aims and ends, and it is inevitable