EXTENSIVE, INTENSIVE FARMING. 2Q 



and Missouri has a still smaller per cent, and she has less crops 

 than either. North Carolina has more people who can read and 

 write than South Carolina and her crops exceed those of the 

 latter state. Compare Louisiana with Georgia, and you will 

 find that Georgia in her crops far transcends the other state, 

 although her lands are poorer. Place Portugal against Spain, 

 Spain against France, and France against Germany, and the 

 same results are seen. France produces only 18 bushels per 

 acre of staple crops, while Germany produces 22 bushels. Ger- 

 many is by nature the poorer state, but all of her farmers read 

 and write, while in France not two-thirds of them are able to 

 do this. And the poorest returns of all the sections of the world 

 come the most fertile soils on the globe, — that is, the black soils 

 of Russia, where a miserable peasantry starve out a miserable 

 existence through the cycles of years as they go by. 



The reason for the decline of our farms and the disappearance 

 of our boys from the farms is not the sterility of the soils. If 

 they are a little stubborn, it is the whetstone upon which our 

 intellects are sharpened. Give a people ambition and purpose 

 in life and the fact of a little stubbornness in the soil is the means 

 to a greater intellectual activity. Instead of being a misfortune, 

 it is in a broad sense a fortune, and never in the history of New 

 England agriculture have the people failed, nor will they fail, 

 because of the infertility of their soils. We have felt that the large 

 and cheap crops of the West have submerged our markets, and 

 have been the true reason for the decline of our agriculture. But, 

 my friends, it will cost you ten dollars to transport fifty bushels of 

 corn from the West to the East, or from the center of its growth, 

 back in Nebraska or Kansas, and eight dollars worth of chemi- 

 cals will grow the fifty bushels right on your own soils, and leave 

 you two and one-half tons of stalks, worth five to seven dollars 

 a ton, in addition. As between corn growing in the East and 

 in the West, the man right on this spot has the supremest oppor- 

 tunity, because the price he receives is so much greater than the 

 necessary cost of the chemicals to grow the plant. If our 

 agriculture has failed to maintain its position, it is not because 

 we could not, when measuring ourselves beside the Western 

 farmer, prove that we were his peer. We must seek some other 

 reason for the retrogression of New England agriculture, in 

 public opinion, in the price of its lands, and in social status. I 



