Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/125

112 them, doubling the harvest while halving the toil, but yet would never tell his better way lest he should hurt the feelings of the people, be thought "radical" and "revolutionary," a "free-thinker," and should lead men to doubt whether it were best to plough and sow at all; or lest they should deny that bread could feed men, or even be raised out of the ground? "What if he were silent for fear he should spoil the sale of acorns and beech nuts by introducing wheat and Indian corn? What if he knew a perfect cure for the disease which makes the potato gather blackness, but would not tell it lest the bountiful supply should hurt the market of some men who had whole acres of onions and cabbages looking up for a high price?

What if he knew of better breeds of swine, horses, and horned cattle; better grains, fruits, flowers, vegetables; of better tools to work with, superior barns and houses to store or to live in, and yet kept it all to himself, fearing that he should be called hard names by such farmers as preferred pounding their corn with pestle and mortar to grinding it in a water-mill?

What if he spent his time in abusing the soil, declaring it capable of no good thing, ruined, lost, depraved, declaring it was impossible to make any improvement in husbandry, that neither material nor human nature would admit of another step in that direction; and took pains to defend the worst faults of the popular agriculture, insisting that the poorest farms were actually the richest, that tares were indispensable to wheat, the field of. the sluggard the best symbol of good farming; and flamed out into elegant wrath against all who dared have better farms and larger crops than their fathers rejoiced in! What could you say to all that? But on the other hand, what if your Superintendent of Farming went manfully to his work, studied the soil and put in fitting crops, pointed out improvements to be made in fencing, draining, ploughing, planting, harvesting; introduced better varieties of cattle and of plants; set the people to think about their work, and so made the head save the hands; taught the children to observe the magnificent beauty of New England flowers and trees, and taught them the great laws of agriculture, whereby "each bush doth put its glory on like a gemmed bride," and in