16 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



But, although we may continue to liill up the corn on higli and 

 low land, in dry and moist soil, alike, — following the savage, 

 who had no other way to do, — it is very certain that New 

 England corn fields now need considerable looking after 

 between seed time and harvest. And the problem of accom- 

 modating the limits of human strength, and the capacity of 

 the soil, to tlie wants of human nature, becomes, in conse- 

 quence, more complicated and more difficult of solution. It 

 is not enough to inquire how we may get the most produce 

 every year from so many roods of surface. There is a sad 

 fallacy in the beautiful rhetoric often quoted on agricultural 

 occasions, that " he is a public benefactor who makes two 

 blades of grass grqw where one grew before," because an im- 

 portant condition still needs to be annexed, namely, without 

 impoverishing the soil. There is no soil rich enough to bear 

 this exhausting drain. For though you may pass the hoe 

 handle to the blade, through the rich deposit of mould, only a 

 very limited portion, in its present position, will help to sustain 

 the crop upon the surface. And, by unsystematized cropping, 

 the fattest prairie lands of the West will soon send back the 

 wail of barrenness which now comes from Virginia, after two 

 hundred years of improvident culture of the richest lands iu 

 the known world. 



Then, again, it is not quantity alone, but qviality, which miist 

 be regarded. Cobbett, long ago, pleaded against the depend- 

 ence of Ireland upon the potato root ; not merely because it 

 was poor policy to have the life of a realm incident to a cul- 

 ture which might at any time prove profitless, but because the 

 profusion in quantity of the crop was likely to banish other 

 edibles from use, while its quality, — containing as it does, 

 seventy-three per cent, of water, and less than thirteen per 

 cent, of nutriment, — was not suited to nourish the higher 

 manly properties upon which, more than upon a given amount 

 of flesh and muscle, manly prowess must depend. That is, 

 that, which will merely sustain life, will not give vitality to it 

 for its higher forms of development. So he would now read 

 Irish history backwards, and say, that, if Ireland has been con- 

 tent under misrule, stolid before governmental deceit, and 

 reckless of mental culture, she owes it as much to the charac- 



