Norwich bulletin., 1913-01-11

(Writen Specially Tor The BuISllh-1
 One of the besetting sins of Amerf- can character is our tendency to wor-
 Somebody is said to have the biggest fortune in the country, whereupon press and people unite to ser nm a sort of altar and bow down before hirn,-though his wealth may have been acquired by means of notorious frauds and utterly contemptible chi cane.
 Somebody has the biggest diamond or the longest rope of pearls and i'm mediately her picture runs through all the yellow journals, though she may be practically devoid of brains or beauty.
 we promptly send for his autograph or an ear of seed-corn from his field.
 I have heard of a store which asks people to buy from it because 1t has
 the bfgges< acreage under one roof of any store in the world"
 And so on and on-
 When was youngster the only farmers who were really looked up to in their various communities were the big farmers If ones farm was so big that it overlapped the town line he was called --Squire:" if by chance 1t happened to fall in two counties, then people drove out of their way to point out his house to visitors. Farms of 800 acres were common; farms uf 500 or 1000 not unusual The little fellow who worked his fifty acres with his own hands assisted by one team wasn't thought to be, and didn't inn ag1ne himself to be, much of farm CT
 Even today, it is the big ranches of the west which we hear most about the great wheat and corn farms of ten or twenty thousand acres, where the blowing and narrowing and seeding are all done at one operation by nam moth tools drawn tandem by huge traction engines, and the harvesting, threshing, etc, done in the same way by a com bination machine as big as house and taking a SWath across the field fifty feet wide. We are shown pictures of these monstrosities at work, and photographs of the owners, and given glowing descriptions of the big way in which they do everything
 It makes our eastern eyes stick out, sometimes, when this sort of thing is spread before them Some of us now and tfsen wonder whether we really are "in 1t" after all; whether we amount to anything much in the worlds work.
 Now Pm assuming that you who read this are a small farmer, as am I who write it
 And I want to say that neither one of us is called upon to take any back seat behind en-Thousand-Acre Jones' or Traction Engine Gang-P1ow Smith.
 The test of a good farmer is not how much he farms but how well he farms.
 Admiration is mere bigness is trait or extreme youth: it is not a mark of adult mentality. The soon CT we grow out of it, the sooner we grow from boyishness to manhood. It isn't because the pyramids are so big that thoughtful travellers admire them Why, there are a thousand hills in Connecticut bigger than the biggest pyramid, and nobody travels across an ocean to see them
 Despite all that we still hear about big farms, 1t is an encouraging sign of the agricultural times to know that the average size of farms in the United States is steadily decreasing. In 1850 the average farm contained POP acres: in 1910 it contained SIS acres So the census figures report When one reflects that all those huge western farms, each with its tens of thousands of acres, have to be included to make up the average, it is manifest that there must be a tremendous lot of farms of even less than 13S acres to bring that average figure to what it is
 One is the broad, general consider l ation that in a democracy like ours it l is vastly safer to have things on a | broad foundation than to have a few insecurely based high spires. It is better than the mass of people should | spread on the level of prosperity than | that a few should climb to useless af- | 1uence above a slough of general des- | pond AS farming is and always must 1 be the occupation of the larger propor- 1 ton of our population, it is especially | needful that the farm industry should | be widely prosperous, rather than | widely poverty stricken, with only oc- | caSional outcrops of wealth There I fore ,it is clearly for our safety, s a | nation, that there should be the Iare- l est possible number of industries but 1 confented farmers. It is better to have ten thousand such on ten thousand | small farms than to have ten thousand peasants" and tenants. working for hire on DiYeS' mil1ion-acre ranch
 Another reason for rejoicing over the decrease in the size of the average Earm is that the small farm is usual