now experienced in village life in Europe might be felt here in the
higher degree which greater intelligence and greater freedom would be
sure to produce.

While advancing these suggestions, with much confidence in their
practical value, I would by no means confine the outlook for Eastern
farming to this single road to success. Co-operative industry may be
largely adopted among farmers living at some distance from each other.
The cheese-factory has become an institution. The better quality of the
product when made in large quantities, and the better price that its
quality and the improved system for marketing have secured, constitute
a very decided success in our agriculture. Butter-factories are coming
into vogue with a promise of equally good results.

A very good substitute for the co-operative management of a milk route
is in very general adoption throughout New England, where some single
farmer who devotes himself to selling milk buys the product of his
neighbor's dairies for a certain fixed price, taking upon himself the
labor, the risk, and the profit of marketing. The co-operative breeding
of live stock cannot as yet be said to have become well established, but
its possibilities of success are considerable. A community can afford to
buy and keep a thorough-bred horse, or bull, or boar, or buck, which
would cost far too much for the means of a single owner, and thus
gradually give to the stock of the whole neighborhood a superiority that
will secure it a wide-spread reputation and insure good prices. Let us
keep always in view the important principle of making two blades of
grass grow where but one grew before; but let us remit no effort which
may tend to make one blade worth what two were worth before.

Incidentally, there may be combinations to secure good outlet drainage
for tracts of land belonging to different owners, and later a provision
for the general irrigation of these lands.

It is not to be hoped, that, either as a whole or in its details,
agricultural improvement is to be advanced with any thing like a rush.
Farmers are generally "conservative" in the worst sense of the term.
They have during the past generation adopted many improvements and
modifications in the methods of their work, the mere suggestion of which
would have been scouted by their fathers; but they are themselves as
ready as their fathers were to scout any further new suggestion, and it
is only by iteration and reiteration that the