I have run over in this general way the ground covered by the speakers merely to show how simply and reasonably this subject of business-like farming can be presented when done right. It is neither an abstract nor a complex study and the essentials can be brought home to the every-day farmer in a very few months. Each speaker, moreover, at my suggestion, besides treating his special subject took occasion to talk on farming as a profession--and especially farming in New England. They emphasized the fact that farming is a big business proposition, an honorable calling, and not merely an effort to raise food supplies for the home. They all dwelt on the fact that New England always had been and still is a farming region. Modern conditions instead of destroying its value as an agricultural country have really increased that value by giving a larger market. But--they emphasized again and again--hard work is required, concentrated intelligent effort, in order to bring results. This is true of every business. The days of fifty years ago when almost any slip-shod method was bound to bring a profit, have passed. Farming has been the last business to accept modern business conditions, but the time has now come when it must. Waste can no longer be tolerated here any more than in other forms of business. A man to succeed must harbor every resource and use every by-product. As one man said, “So keen is competition to-day, so slight a margin of profit is there between competing houses, that very often the man who shows a profit is the man ingenious enough to make it from the by-products which twenty-five years ago were spurned.” One speaker spoke of the Chinese and the tender care they bestow upon a few hundred square feet of land and the results secured from this. “Our ancestors were both hard workers and thrifty,” said he, “and we must get back to their standards. We in the East have been spoiled as well as despoiled by the West. We have listened to stories of thousand-acre farms, steam plows, and million-bushel crops, until our own opportunities seem petty by comparison. We have heard of Oregon fruit farms until our own fruit doesn’t seem worth cultivating. But that’s all wrong. You ought to realize it when in spite of the million dollar crops you find yourselves paying more and more every year for your flour. You ought to realize it whenever you go to the grain mill and pay out your good money for corn that you might as well raise yourselves. As for Oregon apples--don’t let them frighten you. If nature gives them size and color, she makes them pay for it in juice and flavor. They look well in boxes, those apples, but the world is learning to buy New England apples to eat. There isn’t a better apple country on the globe than New England.”