Our food was coarse but wholesome. With the exception of three or four pounds of green tea a year for a family, which cost us three bushels of wheat per pound, we raised everything we ate. We manufactured our own clothes and purchased nothing except now and then a black silk handkerchief or some trifling article of foreign manufacture of the kind. We lived simply, yet comfortably--envied no one, for no one was better off than his neighbour. Until within the last thirty years, one hundred bushels of wheat, at 2s. 6d. per bushel, was quite sufficient to give in exchange for all the articles of foreign manufacture consumed by a large family.... The old-fashioned home-made cloth has given way to the fine broadcloth coat; the linsey-woolsey dresses of females have disappeared and English and French silks been substituted; the nice clean-scoured floors of the farmers' houses have been covered by Brussels carpets; the spinning wheel and loom have been superseded by the piano; and in short, a complete revolution in all our domestic habits and manners has taken place--the consequences of which are the accumulation of an enormous debt upon our shoulders and its natural concomitant, political strife. Students of Canadian history will at once recall the story of the Rebellion of 1837, the struggle for constitutional government, the investigation by Lord Durham, the repeal of the preferential wheat duties in England, the agitation for Canadian independence, and other great questions that so seriously disturbed the peace of the Canadian people. They were the 'growing pains' of a progressive people. The Crimean War, in 1854-56, gave an important though temporary boom to Canadian farm products. Reciprocity with the United States from 1855 to 1866 offered a profitable market that had been closed for many years. Then came the close of the great civil war in the United States and the opening up of the cheap, fertile prairie lands of the Middle West to the hundreds of thousands of farmers set free from military service. This westward movement was joined by many farmers from Ontario; there was a disastrous competition in products, and an era of agricultural depression set in just before Confederation. It was because of these difficulties that Confederation became a possibility and a necessity. The new political era introduced a new agricultural period, which began under conditions that were perhaps as unfavourable and as unpromising as had been experienced for over half a century. THE GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC FARMING, 1867-88 The period that we shall now deal with begins with Confederation in 1867 and extends to 1888, when a provincial minister of Agriculture was appointed for the first time and an independent department organized.