24 MAINE STATE SOCIETY. 



How ungrateful is the man who is not willing to pay back to hi3 

 farm in labor, in wise and skillful culture, the value of what he 

 draws from it, or a part of the value of what he draws from it, 

 it, for the subsistence of himself and family, and for what he sees 

 around him every day in manifold forms of grandeur and beauty, 

 ministering to his laudable pride, and to his enjoyment and 

 delight. How destitute of patriotism, or of filial feelings towards 

 the place of their birth, is he, who, |ifter attaining his manhood and 

 his education upon it, leaves it worn out and bare, and goes abroad 

 to gain a livelihood without toil, or, if not to "reap where he has 

 not sown, " to reap where he has not been required to enrich the 

 soil. Besides, what a poor legacy will he leave to his children, 

 even though his lands may not be impoverished in his own day, 

 even though he may place in their hands thousands and thousands 

 of dollars ; — it will be an inheritance of indolence, of false ideas, of 

 ignorance and shameful prodigality. This may not be or will not 

 be in all cases, but this is the danger ; for thus it has been in many 

 an instance hitherto. And I may say, too, that this man ought not 

 to think that the new lands upon which he pitches his tent, will be 

 forever fruitful, without the application of nourishing and invigora- 

 ting elements from the labor and science of man. " There are, 

 doubtless, many superficial thinkers, " Downing afiirms, " who 

 consider the western soils cxhaustless — prairies where crop after 

 crop can be taken by generation after generation. There was never 

 a greater fallacy. There are acres and acres of land in the counties 

 bordering the Hudson — such counties as Dutchess and Albany — 

 from which the early settlers reaped their thirty to forty bushels of 

 wheat to the acre, as easily as their great-grand children do now in 

 the fertile fields of the valley of the Mississippi. Yet these very 

 acres now yield only twelve or fourteen bushels each, and -the 

 average yield of the county of Dutchess — one of the most fertile and 

 best managed on the Hudson, is at the present moment only six 

 bushels of wheat to the acre ! One of our cleverest agricultural 

 writers has made the estimate that of the twelve millions of acres 

 of cultivated land in the State of New York, eight millions are in 

 the hands of ' skinners, ' who take away everything from the soil, 

 and put nothing back ; three millions in the hands of farmers who 

 manage them so as to make the lands barely hold their own, while 



