SPEECH OF HON. JUSTIN S. MORRILL. 121 



our mode the earliest crops are seldom subsequently equalled, and 

 the last are apt to be the worst. 



The proportion of population of the United States engaged in 

 agriculture in 1840 was 17.4 per cent., but in 1850 it had fallen to 

 44.69 per cent. In 1860 the percentage is doubtless still less, as 

 we find the increase of population much the largest in towns and 

 cities, and in some rural districts the population has positively- 

 diminished. Taking the cities and towns with over five thousand 

 inhabitants, the increase has been 60.43 per cent., and all the rest 

 of the country only 31.96 per cent., or the former nearly double 

 that of the latter. If all the villages towns and cities should be 

 included, the fact would be shown in a much stronger light. This 

 tendency to desert the rural districts, and to shun manual labor, 

 can only be checked by making the country more attractive and 

 more renumerative. The architectural monuments of opulence 

 have risen in the towns and cities at the expense of the more solid 

 and pervading evidences of a nation's prosperity, which are to be 

 mainly found in the unostentatious improvements of the buildings 

 and cultivated fields of the rural population. 



I will not attempt to enumerate what has been done and is now 

 in progress by European nations to promote agricultural educa- 

 tion. It would occupy too much space. It "is enough to know 

 that they all seem eager to place their people ahead in the great 

 race for the mastery. Our nation has been the first to test the 

 value of iron clad ships, but we lag immeasurably behind in im- 

 proving the resoux'ces necessary to support such ships. The 

 efibrts of our foreign rivals are on the most liberal and persistent 

 scale, and have thus far been in the main successful, and this is 

 proven by their continued annual appropriations for this object. 

 Among these governments, that of Louis Napoleon, as usual, occu- 

 pies a prominent position. Many crops in France, within a few 

 years have been doubled ; some have been quintupled ; live stock 

 has been doubled in number and value ; and, while the profits of 

 farmers and the wages of laborers have also been doubled, taxes on 

 lands have been actually diminished. The Second Empire may not 

 claim credit for the whole of these improvements, but the services 

 of the present Emperor have been so great, according to a late 

 writer, "that one of the charges brought against him by his un- 

 compromising opponents is, that these benefits have caused the 

 nation to forget even that loss of freedom by which they have been 

 purchased." 



