CHAPTER XXIV.

GREELEY AS A BOOK FARMER.

A Chapter Consisting of what Mr. Greeley Knows About Farming, and which, therefore, has Nothing In It.

We had intended to go somewhat into detail in describing Mr. Greeley's method of farming and enunciating his peculiar theories concerning agriculture-all this mainly as a curiosity, and as an illustration of how easy it is for a born philosopher to construct half a dozen theories without possessing one fact; but our space is too far overrun for this, and the chapter will therefore have to be very brief.

Mr. Greeley has a farm at Chappaqua station, town of Newcastle, Westchester county, New York, some 35 miles from the city. This farm, mostly marsh and unpromising upland, cost him $140 an acre; and he has been at work on it twenty years trying to make a model farm of it. Its total area, as increased by late purchases, is seventy acres; and of this, fifty acres is a hill-top. He visits it every Saturday, and gives the man who carries it on for him a good top-dressing of profanity and a rich mulching of theory; and the man has, by diligently avoiding the latter and benignantly forgiv

ing the former, been able to keep himself and wife alive on the product of the seventy acres.

As everybody knows, Greeley has been a very voluminous writer upon agriculture. His book, called "What I Know About Farming," has obtained a large circulation by being given away as a premium for subscribers, when the portrait of the Sage of Lackawaxen himself had no further charm for rural readers. It is beyond cavil, one of the most entertaining books in the language It fills a place in American literature somewhat akin to that occupied in English by a'Beckett's "Comic History of England." In it the reader is afforded the luxury of seeing a great mind turn itself inside out, and evolve things from the focal point of what it does not contain. It is a complete refutation of the ancient maxim, ex nihilo, nihil fit. This may have been true in ancient Roman times, but no man who sees Horace Greeley evolve a bookful of agricultural aphorisms out of his own internal consciousness, will longer believe that "out of nothing, nothing can be made." This circumstance affords further evidence of Greeley's leading principle that the world is all awry, and has got to be reconstructed altogether, from keel to topmast.

Horace tells us that during the fifteen years of apprenticeship which he served on his father's farm, he "learned no more about farming than a plowhorse ought to know"; but he thinks if he could have had such a book as "What I Know About Farming," to read, he would have become so fascin

ated with his calling that he would have continued a good agriculturist to this day; and he closes his book, at the 52nd chapter, "with the joyful hope that its perusal will inspire in the mind of the young agriculturist a desire for something better"-a hope that is doubtless realized. At least the old farmers, who are not to be caught with book chaff, have usually signified, after reading Horace's essays, that they "desire something better," or nothing at all.

Mr. Greeley's great hobby as an agriculturist, is deep plowing. He will not stop a barley-corn short of thirty inches; and the brindle steers that perish in the attempt to haul subsoil plows through the stony hard-pan at this depth are of no more account to him than the thousand soidiers who got their death at Bull Run. He has also strong ideas upon the subject of irrigation, and actually delivered a lecture in the Wabash Valley of Indiana— a district almost constantly flooded from the river, and malarious from alluvial deposits, recommending elaborate apparatus for this purpose!

Being compelled to summarize Mr. Greeley's agricultural platform very briefly, we will adopt his own style of re-laying the planks of the Cincinnati platform, and throw it into a letter to the illustrious author-thus:

HON. HORACE GREELEY:

ANYWHERE, July 4, 1872.

Sir:-I have received your work entitled “What I know of Farming," which contains your gospel of agriculture. Being a young farmer without experience one of those young men whom you have so impetuously advised to "take $250 and go West"-your book will, I anticipate, prove of

inestimable value to me in supplying those precepts of which a lamentable defect in my early training places me so greatly in need. Your precepts aforesaid, as I understand them from a careful reading, may be fairly epitomized as follows:

CONCERNING PLOWING.-That thirty inches is the requisit depth, no matter whether we are raising strawberries or oaks. That the man who plows shallower than this is an idiot or a knave, and that State's prison is too good for him. That we really can't have any successful farming until somebody invents a steam plowman who whistles as he goes, and pulverizes crosswise and otherwise, ten to twenty acres per day. I am reserving all my plowing till that happy day.

"

CONCERNING WHERE TO FARM.-That if I "cannot coax it (my farm) to grow decent crops of anything," I must run away from it or work out by the day" for my more fortunate neighbor," and that you and I are in favor of "a law compelling him" (the more fortunate neighbor) to employ me whenever I demand employment. That I must n't go West with a family on my hands, nor must I buy a farm on credit; but that I must take $2,000 and buy up somebody's improvements and farm it in peace and comfort. (By the way, Mr. Greeley, must n't we have a law compelling somebody to give me that $2,000? Some "more fortunate neighbor," for instance?)

CONCERNING TREES.-That "for every tree cut down, two should be planted." This rule is invariable. That you are in favor of chestnut, walnut, hickory, white oak, locust and white pine as the proper trees to be planted; that you don't know whether they will grow or not, but that they ought to, and should be compelled to do their duty. (What I Know, etc., page 54.)

CONCERNING DRAINING.-That water will not, as you formerly supposed, run on level ground. (Ibid p. 65). That the way to make a good drain is to find out how you made yours at Chappaqua, and then proceed as unlike you as possible, (Ibid p. 66); and that to get a drain well laid, I should go to "Messrs. Chickering & Gall," New York, (Ibid p. 67); and that it wont pay to wall in a brook as you did, at the expense of $3,000, when the spring floods carry the walls away every year.

CONCERNING IRRIGATION.-That, next to deep plowing, this is the first law of nature; that irrigating dams like yours, which cost $90-"twice what it ought to have been,"-and which don't work then, are productive of irritating damns, even in Philosophers.

CONCERNING GUANO.-That it is a very reprehensible beverage for the soil to make use of-in fact, as you felicitously style it, "the brandy of vegetation;" and that being, moreover, the product of the pauper labor of pigeons in savage islands, it should not be allowed to come in competition with protected American gypsum.

CONCERNING APPLE TREES.-That no limb should extend more than eight feet from the trunk; that "for shedding wind barren trees are best ;"

that caterpillars are incongenial to apples, and that "no man who harbors caterpillars has any moral right to apples." That apples are often lost through the too early blossoming of the trees, and the subsequent appearance of Jack Frost, and that the placing of ice under the roots of the trees will obviate this evil. (Ibid p. 141.)

CONCERNING POTATOES.-That the aspiration of the age is toward a Perfect Potato; and that "he who originates a really valuable new Potato deserves a recompense for his industry"—perhaps to have your next book dedicated to him, as the present is "to the future inventor of the steam plow," whereby "Not Less than Ten Acres per Day shall be Pulverized to a Depth of Two Feet, at a Cost of not more than Two Dollars per Acre." I find, also, to quote your valuable Work, that potatoes cannot be honestly raised without treating them to Swamp Muck.

CONCERNING BEETS AND CARROTS.-That these are proper vegetables, which deserve encouragement; that you yourself have never succeeded with Beets (no political insinuation) but that you "confidently expect to be able soon to raise 1,000 bushels of Carrots, and 1,500 bushels of Beets per acre." I will defer my experiments with those roots until you tell me how you did this.

CONCERNING ANIMALS.-That you have understood sheep to be valuable animals to the farmer; but that you know nothing about Animals, of your own positive knowledge, and therefore relegate that subject to the several Congressional districts; but that concerning Dogs, you have no hesitation in counting them as disreputable, and recommend strychnine for the whole species.

CONCERNING PASTURING.-That it is "a process I (you) detest ;" that it is a radical, incurable vice, "(Ibid p. 19, 20,) etc.; and that a prohibitory law, making pasturing a penal offence, and authorizing the seizure and destruction of all pastures, would therefore, according to the Greeley philosophy, be a good thing. This is a subject which I feel should not be "relegated."

CONCERNING GRAIN RAISING.-That the prettiest way to raise Wheat is to take $72,000 and buy 400 acres of desert in New Jersey, put on $24,000 worth of Marl, $20,000 worth of Swamp Muck, $5,000 worth of Oyster Shell Lime, and $5,000 worth of Bone Flour, and sow Wheat upon the compost thus formed, (Ibid p. 767.) I am now looking for a man to loan me $72,000 on security of the probable crop. Several have refused. Will you please brand them in the Tribane as liars, cut-throats and villains ?

Yours admiringly,

JONAS PEAPOD.

GREELEY'S BATTLE OF DORKING.

The vagaries of Mr. Greeley on the subject of