There is fascination for most minds in naked magnitude. The young colonel, who can hardly handle a brigade effectively in battle, would like of all things to command a great army; and the tiller of fifty rugged acres has his ravishing dreams of the delights inherent in a great Western farm, with its square miles of corn-fields, and its thousands of cattle. Each of them is partly right and partly wrong. There are generals capable of commanding 100,000 men, Napoleon says there were two such in his day--himself and another: and these generally find the work they are fit for, without special effort or aspiration. So there are men, each of whom can really farm a township, not merely let a herd of cattle roam over it unfed and unsheltered, living and dying as may chance: the owners expecting to grow rich by their natural increase. This _ranching_ is not properly farming at all, but a very different and far ruder art. I judge that the farmers who can really till--or even graze--several thousand acres of land, so as to realize a fair interest on its value, are even scarcer than the farms so capacious. But there is such a thing as farming on a large scale; and it is a good business for those who understand it, and have all the means it requires. The farmer who annually grows a thousand acres of good Grain, and takes reasonable care of a thousand head of Cattle, is to be held in all honor. He will usually grow both his Grain and his Beef cheaper than a small farmer could do it, and will generally find a good balance on the right side when he makes up and squares his accounts of a year's operations. I could recommend no man to run into debt for a great farm, expecting that farm to work him out of it but he who inherited or has acquired a large farm, well stocked, and knows how to make it pay, may well cling to it, and count himself fortunate in its possession. But the great farmer is already regarded with sufficient envy. Most boys would gladly be such as he is; the difficulty in the case is that they lack the energy, persistency, resolution, and self-denial, requisite for its achievement. We will leave large farms and farming to recommend themselves, while we consider more directly the opportunities and reasonable expectations of the small farmer. The impression widely current that money cannot be made on a small farm--that, in farming, the great fish eat up the little ones--is deduced from very imperfect data. I have admitted that Grain and Beef can usually be produced at less cost on great than on small farms, though the rule is not without exceptions. I only insist that there are room and hope for the small farmer also, and that large farming can never absorb nor enable us to dispense with small farms.