THE ADVANTAGE OF SHOWS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 2, Issue 344, 19 December 1879, Page 2

THE ADVANTAGE OF SHOWS.

Lord Derby, at an agricultural meeting recently m England, made the following •emarks :-As long as there are two ways sf doing anything, a right way and a wrong way; as long as veeda and rushes grow in our fielda-and as I looked out of the window of the railway carriage I saw agood few of them, even in Lancashire; aslong as the earth, which we want to have properly dug into and ploughed, and the wholesome light and air let into it is m some places scratched on the surface, as it tho people who had to do with it were afraid of hurting it; as long a9all the dirt mid refuse of the town, which even the Chinese know how to put back on the soil, is turned into our rivers to poison them, and then allowed to drift out to sea in order to show the very fish what fools we are; as long M W6 have waste land growing nothing but gome and thistles waste labor, and what might be and ought to bo labor, waste hands that eught to be laborers' hands running into idleness, and through idleness into miscnef; as long as all these thing last, and % will last pur time-became bad ways talce a deal of long, I say, there will be need fer, and a use ?iiho£ and gatherings and meetings and exhibitions of this kind. I don't speak of the pleasure they give in a social way, because that we can all realise; but we can very well understand that if a man does not go from his home more than once in six weeks or a couple of months, except to church or to the market he ut apt to think—all people do it who have not the opportunity of comparing themselves with their neighbors—that there are no cows like his cows, and no crops like his crops, and no pigs like his pios. and that his farm is a model farm generally, and that all his geese are « It is no use to tell a man when he is in that way, that other people do a grew deal more than he does; in the first place he don't believe you But seeing is believing, and a man of the und I have been mentioning goes home from a show of this sort with some of the conceit knocked out of him, and instead ot that, some of those uncomfortable but use ul jhsngs, new ideas, insterted into h« brain. What an exhibition of this und is meant for, what it has got to say to all or any of us who have anything to do with farming, is just this,-' My good friends, you think you think you are doing very well with that bit of a holding of yours, and perhaps you are; but just look here, and here, and here-jUSt look at that pig and that cow, and that laborsaving machine, and that bunch of turnips, and that lot of potatoes, and you will see that, clever as you think yourself you might manage a great deal bet tor. Well, that is the plain English oi