183 



for their fruits, and spices, and drugs, and set to forcing exotics or exper- 

 imenting on substitutes, vainly fancying they can, by hook or by crook, 

 reverse the laws of nature; or rather, betraying their ignorance that 

 nature has any laws at all. But after wasting time and money to their 

 heart's content, upon such experiments, they find themselves in possee- 

 sion of less than a moiety of those products which they might have pro- 

 cured with the same outlay through the medium of commerce, had they 

 devoted their lands to the purposes for Avhich nature intended them ; and 

 not only so, but they find the stinted product very inferior in quality. 

 Their sugar is black and bitter ; their coloring matter is dull ; their exotic 

 fruits, if not killed by the frost, are dwarfish and insipid ; their coffee has 

 the flavor of parched beans ; and their drugs have scarcely enough of the 

 medicinal properties to answer the purposes of a Homoepathist. 



Says the writer above quoted* (and whose reasoning is no less worthy 

 the attention of the farmer than of the statesman.) "It is always a bad 

 speculation to attempt raising the products of the torrid, under the sun 

 of the temperate latitudes. The saccharine and coloring juices, raised on 

 European soils, with all the forcing in the world, are very inferior in 

 quality and quantity to those w^hich grow in profusion in other climates. 



***** In condemning our lands to the growth 

 of products ill-suited to them, instead of those they are better calculated 

 for, and consequently, buying very dear what we might have cheap 

 enough, if we would consent to receive them from places where they are 

 produced with advantage, we are ourselves the victims of our own ab- 

 surdity. It is the very acme of skill, to turn the powers of nature to 

 the best advantage, and the height of madness to contend against them ; 

 which is, in fact, wasting part of our strength in destroying those pow- 

 ers she designed for our aid." 



In some portions of the torrid zone, the sugar cane attains to a gigantic 

 ^owth, filled to its tip with saccharine juice, and so rich, that it will 

 sometimes partially granulate as soon as exposed to the air ; whilst those 

 same regions are ill-suited to the growth of northern products. There 

 is no natural reason why a farmer in Wisconsin might not exchange, 

 directly or indirectly, a barrel of flour for a barrel of sugar, or nearly in 

 that ratio, and eS'ect other exchanges at similar rates. There are, how- 

 ever, some of the fruits of the warmer latitudes, such as fresh grapes, 



•Say'a Political Economy, Book I., Chap. 7, Sec. 1. 



