Norwich bulletin., 1910-03-26
~ R1s9 ElEn Es;En;s @ X 1.-THE FARMERS TALK1
 A TO FARMERS ml
How hinqs in the Distance Loom-When it Comes Facts they Do Not Swell Up So-A Few Examples of the of the Statistcians = Hcw Incomes are Doubled by Careless Figuring-Modesty is Good and Enduring Quality for the Farmer
(written for The Bulletin.)

(Written for The Bulleun.)
 If you've ever noticed it, most of the wonderful cures which the patent medicines print testimonials about what occurred out in Kansas or California The subjects of these miracles usually live too far away to make a personal inspection of them feasible. I don't say this is always so. but it is the gen. eral rule.
 Similarly, notice that most of the wonderful and phenomenal prosperity of the farming community in 1909 took place about two thousand miles dis tant. I read of farmers in southern
 Missouri buying thousand dollar horses
 to blow with and building electric
 roads out of their spare profits. I also
 read of farmers in Kansas and -Nebras-
 ka being big automobile buyers. When
 l look over the reports of nice old
 Uncle Wilson of the department of az
 riculture I find that the farmers are
 indiScriminately made out to be rolling
 in wealth, but that the details-when
 you finally get down to them-refer to
 South Dakota or Oklahoma or Minne-
 sota-
 Really, when you stop to think and
 use your memory a little, you see that
 there's nothing so very unusual about
 this. The Whoop is a little louder than
 usual, just now, but it's the same old
 hullabaIoo about what some other
 farmer is doing, somewhere long way
 off. We old hayseeds have heard lots
 of it during the few and evil days of
 our pilgrimage. Why, I can remember
 when half the lads of twenty used to
 sleep with their faces towards Illinois.
 so they could be sure to start in the
 right direction the day they were
 twenty-one. It was the land of prom
 ise to them, where farming was just fun, and all the farmers were fat, rich and sassy. l can remember, too, when
 they began to look still farther, and
 ho set Iowa
 braska, where, again, farming was to
 be all fun and profit. It was always
 way off yonder' that this sort of thing was going on-never in ones
 I've read of somebody growing 226 bushels of corn to the acre-down in North Carolina. I've read of somebody hundred bushels of potatoes to the acre-out in Idaho. I've read of farm CTS raising thirty bushels of wheat to the acre, at a cost of one-tenth the product-up in Manitoba, where the Canadian railroad wants to sell more land. It's always lover the hills and far away that these earthly paradises for the farmer gleam.
 As rve said, there's nothing unusual about it all. It's just the oldest human characteristic cropping out perennial ly. When you were a boy, didn't you
  the summits Of the horizon cribing hills and wish you were old enough and big enough to climb them and peer over into the wonderful and magnih- cent myste~7es which you felt must lie beyond? ny, there might be bears over there; or Indians, or birds of paradise with yard-long, rainbow -hued pIumes; certainly there was something different from the familiar bushes and grass and weeds and stupid old cows of fathers farm. But when you did at last get big enough to run away one summer day with your cherished bow found the other side was very much like this side-only perhaps a little more so. Now. didn't you?
 As Ionq ago as they talked Latin the old philosophers had a phrase to de- scribe this form of human nature. "Omne ignotuGn pro nagnihco," they used to say. Literally this means In plain English we should say: "The less you know of a thing the bigger 1t seems" I'm grow ing a little shy of all these wonders which are to be found somewhere else. ] My short experience in life has aroused | in me the suspicion that somewhere l else" is very much the same as right 1 here" and that I'll find it so when I l get there. Of course, a farm in the l valley is better than one on the top of the White mountains. I | suspect it's better than one on the l western Sierras, too, and just as good | as any in the Mississippi or the Colun- | bia valleys.
 They say. "figures won't Iie," and | therefore the wonderful prosperity Of l the American farmer must be true, | since the figures show it. To which I | respond that figures may not lie, but l that statistics and market reports can | ie-and do, very frequently. If you | don't believe it, just try to get from a l the price for your strictly fresh near oy'' eggs which the market reports | quote them att I've recently run across ! Kansas farmers statement of the | way in which the figures from his in- 1ividual farm were used to swell the .hurrah boys tale of agricultural