"My father could not give me much school learning, but he learnt me to farm it thoroughly. I've been at it a good many years now, and I know by experience the truth of what he taught me. If there's ever been anything more than our living at the end of the year, it's only because we all worked hard, my wife and daughter as hard in the house as me and my son on the farm; and because we studied to raise the best of everything we could, and to get the best prices we could, and we saved every penny that could be saved. "My son wanted to study to be a doctor when he was growing up, and so I gave him the best schooling that he could get around here; and when he was old enough, and I saw his mind was made up, I sent him to the best medical college I could find. And I've given my daughter all the schooling she's had the strength for. It's the best economy to get the best, whether it's buildings, or tools, or stock, or education; and there's a great deal more satisfaction in it besides. I tell you this because it's my experience, and I know it, but I owe it mainly to the raising my father gave me. It's hard work, and it's hard study, and it's awful careful economy in little things as well as big, that makes a man succeed in any business. "You've heard the saying that 'the luxuries of one generation are the necessities of the next.' That's certainly true in the country. I've heard my grandfather say that when he was a boy it didn't take more than ten dollars a year to pay for everything that the family bought. All that they wore and ate and drank they raised on the farm, and they built their own buildings, and made their own tools, mostly, and worked out most of their taxes. "I'm not saying that farmers must go back to that. It ain't possible. It's every way better now to buy your cloth than to make it, and so with your tools, and many other things; but when I see a farmer's family spend in a year for clothes and feathers and finery as much as ten families did for all they bought in the old days, and at the same time their fences are falling and their stock suffering from neglect, I see that these people don't know their business. And when I see a farmer mortgage a piece of land to give his daughter a fashionable wedding, and then complain that there ain't a living to be made any more in farming, I'm sorry for him. "You see, in the old days the ways of farming were primitive and simple, and the ways of living were primitive and simple, too, and they matched each other. Now both have changed. Farming is different, and living in the country is different. The style of living in the country is copied from the towns, where there's been the greatest increase of producing power; and I argue that the increase of producing power on the farms hasn't by any means kept up to what it is in the cities.