THE ADVANTAGES OF AGRICULTURAL SHOWS.

Waikato Times, Volume XIII, Issue 1147, 1 November 1879, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE ADVANTAGES OF AGRICULTURAL SHOWS.

Lord 'Derby, at an agricultural meeting, recently m England, niado the following remarks : — \ As long as there are two ways of doing anything, a right and a wrong way ; as long as weeds and rushes grow m our fields — and as I looked oti.fc of the window of the railway carriage, I saw a good few of them, even m Lancashire ; as long as the earth, , which we want to have properly dug into and ploughed, and the wholesome light and air lot into it, is ill some plages scratchec! on the surface, as if the people who bad.

to with it were afraid of hurting it; as long as all the dirt and refuse of the town, which even the Chinese know how to put back on the sol, is turned into our rivers to poison them, and then allowed to drift out to sea m order to show the very fish what fools wo are; as long as we have waste land growing nothing but gorse and thistles, waste labor, , and what might be and ought to be labor, waste hands that ought to be ! laborer's hands running into idleness, an:l through idleness into j mischief ; as long as all these things I last, aud they will last our time— I because bad ways take a .deal of ! mending— so long, I say, there will bo a need for, and a use m, shows and gatherings, and meetings and exhibitions of this kind. I don't speak of the pleasure they give m a, social way, because that we can all realise ; but we can very well understand that if a man does -not go from his horne v more than once m six weeks or a'couple of months, except to church or to market, he is apt to think — all people do it who have not tho. opportunity of comparing themselves with their neighbors— that there are no sows like his cows, and no crojte like his crops, and no pigs liks his pigs, and that his farm is a model farm generally, and that all "his geeso are swans. It is no use to tell a man when he is m that way that other people do a great deal more thau be 1 dbeß ; m the first place, he don't' like it jin the second place, lie .don't , believe you. But seeing is believing ; and a man of the kind I have been mentioning goes home from a show fii^ this sort with some of the conceit knocked out of him ; and instead of that, some of those uncomfortable but useful things, inserted into his brain. What an exhibition of this kind is meant for, what it has got to say to all or any of us who havo anything to do with' farming — is just this — My good friend, you think you are doing very well with that bit of a holding of yours, and perhaps yo" are ; jusb look hero, and here; just look . at that pig, and that cow, and that lab©r-saving machine, and that bunch of turnips, and that lot of potatoes, and you will see that, clevor as you think yourself, you might manage a great deal hotter.' Well, that is the plain English of ib.