"And here's another thing that makes a great difference between farming and other kinds of business. When I go to the city I most generally visit some factory and go through it as carefully as I can. The machinery is interesting and wonderful, and if it's something useful they're making, I like to compare the productive power of the factory hands with what it would be if they were all working separately by the old methods. But besides this, there's the wonderful economy that I see. The factory is built so as to save all the carting that's possible, and there's men always studying how they can make it more convenient, and can improve the machinery and cut down the costs. And then I don't find any leakage anywhere that can be helped; and it's most wonderful what they do in some kinds of manufacturing with what you'd think was the very refuse, working it up into some by-product that makes the difference between profit and loss in the whole business. It's close culture of the closest kind applied to manufacture. "Sometimes I've had a chance to talk to a superintendent of a factory, and he's told me about the business from the inside--how carefully he must study the market and how closely he must calculate a hundred things; and how exactly his books must be kept, and how easy it is for a little thing that's been miscalculated or overlooked to ruin the business. "I tell you that I've come to see pretty clearly that the business that pays in these times of competition is a powerful lucky one and powerful well managed. When the year's work is done and the wages have been paid, and the rent and the interest on the capital paid up, and the salaries paid to the brains that run the thing, it's a remarkable business that's got anything over in the way of profit. "Now, the farming business, as I look at it, is a long way behind all that. We don't know much about close culture in farming in America, and I don't believe there's one farmer in five hundred that keeps books and can tell you exactly where he stands; and these things we've got to learn. It's terrible easy to let things go their own way pretty much--until the fences are falling down and your buildings are out of repair, and your tools are going to ruin with rust, and your children are not having good advantages. You may think that you're too poor to afford anything different and that it's economy to live so. But it ain't; it's the worst kind of waste. It takes a sight of hard work, brainwork, and handwork, too, to get good, substantial buildings and fences, and tools and stock, and to keep them good and to raise your children well. You've got to make a close calculation on every penny, but it's the only true economy. The difference between the economy of shabbiness and the economy of thrift is the difference between waste and saving.