130 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Here I have to show you some of the sugar that was made from 

 those ripe corn-stalks. It is a fair quality of Muscavado sugar. 

 It is a raw sugar and needs refining just as raw beet sugar does, but 

 it could be sold in any market in Christendom. It has a little 

 flavor of the corn which is not pleasant ; but it is a sugar that could 

 be sold as readily as the corn that grew upon the stalks. 



There is another aspect of this matter. A year ago I examined 

 the reports from the "Western States of the acreage yield in our two 

 cereals, corn and wheat, and contrasted them with the acreage yield 

 of all our Eastern States for the years 1862 and 1877. I found 

 what astonished me, viz., that although our recent years have been 

 years of amazing fruitfuluess as we learned day after da}' during the 

 recent campaign, notwithstanding there has been a gradual falling 

 off in fifteen j-ears through the West, there has been a slight increase 

 in the acreage yield in the East. I found, too, that we are to-day 

 in the East (and I counted ever}' New England State, all the Mid- 

 dle States, and the Northern Atlantic States, east of Ohio — I took 

 all with Ohio and the West for Western States) raising more corn 

 and more wheat to the acre than the average in the West. Recently 

 I have calculated those results for the past eighteen j'ears, from 

 1862 to 1880, and grouped them into two groups of nine j'ears 

 each, so there is no questioning the conclusion, and I find the same 

 fact true. I could give you the exact figures. I found that there 

 has been a gradual falling off in the production of the West and a 

 slight increase in the East, and that we, in the East, are producing 

 more of corn, more of wheat to the acre than in the West, and 

 although the falling off is not so marked in per cent., still, owing to 

 the enormous acreage it again brings us into the millions in consid- 

 eration. For instance, at the prices at which wheat and corn sold 

 through the West last j'ear, the diminished number of bushels 

 caused a loss of thirtj'-two millions of dollars in the Western States. 

 That is an enormous sum. And, in the East, this slight increase, 

 at the prices at which corn and wheat were sold in the Eiast, — the 

 slightly increased crop of the last j'ear gave us for our wheat and 

 corn four million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars more than 

 if our acreage yield had been at a stand still for the past ten years. 

 At ever}' agricultural meeting we attend we hear of the exhaustless 

 resources of the West, that it is the grainary which is to supply- the 

 teeming millions of the future. Now it seems to me the facts hardly 

 justify such a sanguine view. I see no cause for alarm, but, as we 



