Norwich bulletin., 1912-10-05
x EXPERIENCE AND THEORY WORK WELL
 TOGETHER

(W1Nten Specially for The Bulletin.)
 To say that the new neighbor is a book farmer" is, in many sections, to utter the last word of contemptuous dismissal
 There's no use denying it, we old hayseeds do not take to what we call kid glove notions'' about farming.
 We have calloused our palms and broken our finger-nails and torn our shirts, too, many years in our rough and tumble scrapping matches with Nature to believe in the efficiency of anything less thorough going than blood and iron,"-to use Bismark's famous phrase.
 Everybody admits that there is no royal road to learning. We old fell lows are as emphatic in asserting that there's no easy way of farming.
 Sometimes 1 wonder whether we are right, or whether we are just pig headed old fogies too "sOt" and stub- born to learn. Frankly, have to con- fess that I have never found any way to farm 1t which was not hard work. Nor have I ever happened to run across any other farmer, without larg- CT capital, who could make decent living without steady hard work.
 Of course, the chap who has plenty of money can usually make his money work for him and save him the sweat. But, in that case, he simply transfers the toll to some other hired shoulders. The toll itself cannot be escaped or evaded. It is the price which must be paid for Achievement:-the Sine qua non of Success. And, again speak ing for myself alone, I own up to a much higher respect for the man who pays the price with the strain and stress of his own struggle than for the man who hires some one else to do it for him. Just as respect more highly the volunteer who shoulders his musk ct and went to war than the stay at-home who hired substitute.
 On the other hand, 1t seems to me that we're liable to be l-e-e-t-l-e bit ''off' when we make an idol of mere work, and worship it as something holy in itself. This is carrying the thing too far. As means to an end, work seems to be something we can't get along without. But it iDn't an end in itself I'm perfectly willing to ad- init that I should be very much obliged to anybody who would show me how to attain the same results as now with half the work. In that case, I'd elther. nave more time TOT nSnlng, or, I'd know how to double results. Which l should do would depend largely on my temperament and on the condition of the weather.
 " e
 At present, and as things now are, 1t seems inevitable that farmers. like other folks, must pay for what they get. either in money or in labor. As we generally haven't the money, 1t must be the other thing. And we haven't much interest,-unless an amused contempt be called interest, ,-- in the doings of callow chaps who think that they, with their cheese cloth theories, can wipe the eyes of our hard and double-twisted expert ence.
 Some of the popinjays turned out by some of the agricultural colleges have helped to heighten this contempt. We have all of us seen young sprigs, fresh from the laboratory, and without a trace of tan on their cbeeks or a single callous on their hands, assume that about everything we old hunks had been doing was wrong and that they were divinely appointed to teach us better.
 Is it any wonder that the "old