28 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



NEW-ENGLAND FARMING RESTORED. 



[From an Address before the Housatonic Agricultural Society.] 



BY PKOFESSOB S. T. FKOST. 



The first product of American agriculture, the first that 

 expanded into an export, came from the Virginia tobacco- 

 fields. Rich and quick profits stimulate culture; and the 

 hungry, exhaustive tobacco-plants fed upon the richness of 

 the forest soil with all the insatiable greediness of Solomon's 

 " daughters of the horse-leech." And when they dropped off, 

 gorged from the drained soil, the Old-Dominion planter, like 

 Milton's shepherd, found "fresh fields and pastures new." 

 The terrible method passed over the land like locusts, or a 

 fire, leaving individuals very rich, but a community of these 

 same individuals very poor. And finally, in less than a cen- 

 tury, the poverty of the State has re-acted upon the individ- 

 ual ; for no State can long be rich if the lands are poor, and 

 the farm, the farmer, and the Commonwealth are all poor 

 together. 



I have located my illustration in another State, for obvious 

 reasons. It is better to philosophize on our neighbor's faults 

 than on our own: we get the advantage of broad perspective, 

 which distance gives. " 'Tis distance lends enchantment to 

 the view." But seriously, we might have found an illustra- 

 tion nearer home. Those magnificent reaches of hardback, 

 those extended vistas of white birch, that are covering so 

 many hillsides of old New England, are first-cousins to the 

 scrub pines that sing the requiem over the Virginia tobacco- 

 field. They cover lands not worn out maybe, but substan- 

 tially flung away. To a New- York or Pennsylvania farmer, 

 — the third generation, perhaps, on the family homestead, — 

 the present condition of a large part of Massachusetts is a 

 standing puzzle, a perpetual surprise, and all the more incom- 



