EXTENSIVE, INTENSIVE FARMING. 31 



ture. A parallel movement, the founding of the new industries 

 based upon modern sciences, drew our boys and money to develop 

 our cities, to develop new industries and to reorganize old indus- 

 tries on broader lines, and to handle these gigantic consolidations 

 of capital that characterize our times. No such exhaustive 

 demands, as I have already stated, ever confronted any people, 

 and no people in any age of the world have been capable of the 

 mighty work for the human family that Xew England has accom- 

 plished. The work is over, and there no longer is a movement 

 from our farms West. Consumption is overtaking production. 

 The best lands are occupied and in the West have reached such 

 prices as to forbid production at low prices. A quarter section 

 anywhere in the West where we would care to settle is worth 

 ten thousand dollars and it will require several thousand 

 dollars more for a working capital. Prices have risen, never to 

 recede again, giving us a chance to compete with the Western 

 farmer. It has gone to that point where reaction is occurring, 

 and men from the West are settling on some of these farms 

 because they are the cheapest farms in the world. Capital also 

 is flowing back upon every New England state. In my own 

 state it is coming back by millions a year. We have markets 

 unequalled by those of Europe or anywhere else at our very 

 doors, making this today the most desirable opening for a young 

 man with a small capital of any place that I know of. I do not 

 speak sentimentally, but just as I feel about the matter. 



Now, my friends, the question arises as to the influence, the 

 far reaching influence, of this Western boom. I wish to note, 

 first, that with the migration of our strong young men and 

 women there was taken from the farm that surplus labor and 

 capital essential to keep up the old, broad lines of farming. 

 Tillage was narrowed ; fields were put from tillage into grass 

 and some into pasturage. There was a contraction of effort. 

 The motto of "small farms well tilled" arose in the land and 

 every orator voiced it on the platform and every paper in its 

 columns, until it became a stable and proverbial system of farm- 

 ing in New England. To what has it brought us? It has 

 brought us to a capitalization of personal property on the farm 

 of not more than six or seven dollars, the smallest capitalization 

 of any intelligent yeomanry in the world ; less than in the West- 

 ern states with their virgin fertility, where farming is the skim- 



