SPEECH OF HON. JUSTIN S. MORRILL. 123 



to furnish cheap food to our multiplying' and dependent millions, and 

 certainly not possible to respond to the foreign demand of either 

 commerce or famine. If it be true that the man who sells hay will 

 soon raise no hay to sell, because there is no return of manure, 

 the same result is equally apparent from the export of other crops 

 upon the consumption of which on the farm, the reproductive ener- 

 gies of the soil depend for supplies. 



Should no effort be made to arrest the deterioration and spolia- 

 tion of the soil in America, while all Europe is wisely striving to 

 teach her agriculturists the best means of hoarding up capital in 

 the lands on that side of the Atlantic, it is easy to see that we are 

 doomed to be dwarfed in national importance, and not many years 

 can pass away before our ships will be laden with grain, not on 

 their outward but homeward voyage. Then, with cheap bread no 

 longer peculiar to America, our free institutions may be thought too 

 dear by those of whom even empires are not worthy, the men with 

 hearts, hands and brains, vainly looking to our shores for life, lib- 

 erty, and the pursuit of happiness. 



There is and can be no mode by which the resources of a country 

 can be so fully developed, as by educating the vast numbers who 

 are to devote their lives to agricultural employments, as tillers or 

 owners of the soil. By this means each man is trained to bring 

 into action his whole mental and physical force. The immense loss 

 of power through ignorance is saved. The factory girls in America 

 receive two or three times the pay that the same class obtain in 

 other lands ; but this is not all the generous gift of the employers, 

 for they secure in the better educated American girl, a superior 

 and more valuable labor. Intelligent labor is found to be hardly 

 too dear at any price. This is eminently true in agriculture. A 

 dull, uncultured man, though physically a giant does . little work 

 for which brute power might not often be easily substituted. He 

 may move mountains, but the inevitable mouse only appears. The 

 skilled and thoroughly trained farmer is sure to harvest larger 

 crops, and with less labor than his unskilled and untrained neigh- 

 bor. Science, working unobtrusively, produces larger annual 

 returns and constantly increases fixed capital, while ignorant routine 

 produces exactly the reverse. 



The mere dispersion of population over a wider territory im- 

 proves neither the soil, nor the cultivators of the soil, but both, for 

 the time, are made rather the worse by experiments and theories 

 which new conditions ever impose. 



