CULTIVATE THE BEST LAND. 327 



touti 2;, but that at your future meetings these boys come up from 

 that institution, learned enough to instruct the farmers of the 

 State, who shall tell us how to make the soil of Maine produce 

 more than it has in the past. There is one other topic to which I 

 will allude, that is in regard to the feeling of despondency which 

 has prevailed. When we organized our State Board of Agricul- 

 ture in New Hampshire, we issued an address to the people of the 

 State, and prominent in that address was this idea : we must 

 commence the work of making the farmers of New Hampshire 

 stick to their hillsides, and I was the only member of our Board 

 who refused to sign that address, and I refused because I did not 

 believe in it then, and my experience has not led me to believe in 

 it to-day; because I have learned this, that farming on good land 

 pays, but farming on poor land never did pay and never will pay. 

 And now if you will go over New England, you shall see what 

 you will see still further developed, the good land being divided 

 and subdivided, and homes made there more thickly, and the poor, 

 sterile portions of New England given up to forests, which is its 

 best use, as they are becoming more and more valuable. As I 

 have travelled over some sections of your State and many of my 

 own, and have seen homes being erected upon land so poor that 

 they never should have been erected, it has filled me with sorrow, 

 because I know, from their distance from markets, from their poor 

 soil, steep hillsides and rocks, and from all the disadvantages under 

 which they labor, they can only stay there ; they cannot live, and 

 they cannot enjoy the advantages that they should enjoy. They 

 will be poor themselves and raise up children poorer than they are. 

 If I need to bring anything in proof of this, I would take some 

 favored section of my own State, where agriculture is the princi- 

 pal business, where every town gives evidence of thrift and 

 wealth, yet where the people are agriculturists to-day and have 

 been made prosperous from the fertility of the soil and the advan- 

 tages of location. In that fertile soil they have been able to 

 raise fifty bushels of corn to the acre, while the man I first depicted 

 has been unable with the same exertions to raise more than fifteen ; 

 and this has made one set rich, and growing richer, and the other 

 poor and growing poorer. I submit, if there is any duty which 

 this Board of Agriculture owes to this State, it is this : to urge 

 your farmers to stay in Maine, because it is a noble State, and 

 you have enough good land here to maintain, not only your pres- 

 ent population, but twice that. But, sir, policy and good sense 



