but I don't remember that he said anything in it about
the crops. (We can't go 'round meeting the folks all day. We really must
give a glance at the exhibition.) And I am one of those who hold to the
belief that while the farmers can raise ears of corn as long as from
your elbow to your fingertips, as big 'round as a rollingpin, and set
with grains as regular and even as an eight-dollar set of artificial
teeth; as long as they grow potatoes the size of your foot, and such
pretty oats and wheat, and turnips, and squashes, and onions, and apples
and all kinds of truck, and raise them not only in increasing size but
increasing quantities to the acre I feel as if the Republic would last
the year out anyway. Not that I have any notion that mere material
prosperity will make and keep us a free people, but it goes to show that
the farmers are not plodding along, doing as their fathers did before
them, but that they are reading and studying, and taking advantage of
modern methods. There are two ways of increasing your income. One is by
enlarging your output, and the other is by enlarging your share of the
proceeds from the sale of that output. The Grand Dukes will not always
run this country. The farmers saved the Union once by dying for it;
they will save it again by living for it.

The scientific fellows tell us that we have not nearly reached the
maximum of yield to the acre of crops that are harvested once a year,
but in regard to the crops that are harvested twice a day it looks to me
as if we were doing fairly well. Nowadays we hardly know what is meant
by the expression, "Spring poor." It is a sinister phrase, and tells
a story of the old, cruel days when farmers begrudged their cattle the
little bite they ate in wintertime, so that when the grass came again
the poor creatures would fall over trying to crop it. They were so
starved and weak that, as the saying went, they had to lean up against
the fence to breathe. They don't do that way now, as one look at the
fine, sleek cows will show you. A cow these days is a different sort of
a being, her coat like satin, and her udder generous, compared with the
wild-eyed things with burrs in their tails, and their flanks crusted
with filth, their udders the size of a kid glove, and yielding such a
little dab of milk and for such a short period. Hear the dairymen boast
now of the miraculous yearly yield in pounds of butter and milk, and
when they say: "You've got to treat a cow as