There may be times when peculiar atmospheric conditions will exert unfavorable influences, and seasons when drought and wet weather will produce changes, over which human efforts have no control, and for these sufficient allowance must be made. We quarrel with the stupidity, shiftlessness, and ignorance of men, and not with the providence of God.
In this day and age of the world there is no excuse for ignorance upon the points to which we have alluded. Wisdom uttereth her voice in the streets, and he who will not hear her ought to be drummed out of the camp of dairymen. As a rule, a common carpenter puts more thought into his business in a month than many dairymen do in a year. Indeed, it would be difficult to point out a single branch of human industry, of one-half the magnitude which the manufacture and sale of cheese has reached, carried on in a manner so slipshod and slovenly as dairying.
The banker, the columns of whose ledger fail by one cent of balancing, spares neither time nor money in searching out and correcting the error; the merchant brings to bear upon his business a care and insight so unceasing and laborious that his locks are soon sprinkled with premature silver; the machinist works to plans from which the variation of a thousandth part of an inch can not be allowed to pass uncorrected; but the dairyman too often stumbles along through his work without thought, or employs the little intellect he has in putting in and harvesting his crops, leaving the dairy in the meantime to take care of itself. There are too many men engaged in dairying who can see nothing in the business beyond the factory dividend; men to whom filling the milk pail and the can are the Alpha and Omega of life. To such men such a thing as an ambition that their county, town, or neighborhood shall attain and hold a reputation for being the banner cheese district of the State or nation, is as thoroughly unknown as the configuration of the bottom of the Dead sea.
In saying what we have about the patrons of cheese factories, and the closer and more thorough co-operation among them, we have been actuated by no feelings of unkindness or ill will, nor have we arraigned them upon trivial or imaginary charges. The indictments we have found against them are all true bills, against which too many of them will be unable to sustain the plea of not guilty. We have been constrained to our present course by an overmastering sense of the importance of greater care, deeper thought, and closer union in pushing forward one of the greatest industries of the day. I am confident that before another step can be taken in advance it must be preluded by a correction of the errors which we have feebly attempted to portray, all of which lie outside and prior to the factory. As a body, cheese-makers can do little better than they are now doing, until there is some improvement in the material upon which they are called upon to exercise their skill, and the practice of crimination and recrimination, the factorymen tossing the blame upon the dairymen and the dairymen upon the factorymen, which is made use of to conceal the real source of our mistakes, will continue to shield him from the eyes of a discriminating public until the care and diligence of dairymen strip him of this shelter and drive him forward on the march to improvement.
REMEMBER that $2.00 pays for The Prairie Farmer from this date to January 1, 1885; For $2.00 you get it for one year and a copy of The Prairie Farmer County Map of the United States, free! This is the most liberal offer ever made by any first-class weekly agricultural paper in this country.
