y and farm produce and live
stock. I said that my experience about a farm was not such as
would justify me in advising about practical farming, that I was
like many lawyers, preachers, editors and Members of Congress, who
instinctively seek to get possession of a farm, not to show farmers
how to cultivate land, but to spend a good portion of their income
in a healthy recreation, that Horace Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher
were, when living, good specimens of this kind of farmer, that they
all soon learned by sad experience that--

"He that by the plow would thrive,
Himself must either hold or drive."

I claimed to be one of the farmers whose potatoes and chickens cost
more than the market price. Still, those engaged in professional
pursuits, and especially Members of Congress, have to study the
statistics of agriculture because upon the increase and diversity
of its varied productions depend the wealth and progress of the
country for which we legislate. I will not undertake to repeat in
any detail what I said. I drew the distinction between the work
of a mechanic and the work of a farmer; the mechanic had but a
single employment and sometimes confined himself to the manufacture
of a single article, but the farmer must pursue the opposite course.
He must diversify his crops each year, and the nature of his labors
varies with the seasons. His success and profit depend upon the
diversity of his productions, and the full and constant occupation
of his time. I described what I had seen in the far-off region
near the new city of Tacoma on Puget Sound, where the chief employment
of the farmer is in raising hops, and also the mode of producing
wheat in the vast plains of Canada, which, now that the buffalo is
gone, are plowed in the spring, sown in wheat and left unguarded
and untended until ready for the great machines which cut and bind
the crop and thresh it ready for the market. I described the
production of the celery plant in the region of Kalamazoo, Michigan,
where a large portion of the soil is devoted to this vegetable.
As each region varied in climate, soil and market, the occupations
of farmers had to vary with the conditions that surrounded them.
The great cereals, such as wheat, corn, oats and barley, can be
produced in most parts of the United States. Our farmers ought
constantly to diversity their crops and add to the number of their
productions. Attention had been recently turned to the possibili