AGRICULTURAL HEAD-WORK. 17 



ter of her food, as to the laws of the realm, or to the ministers 

 under those laws. 



The quality as well as the quantity of production must enter 

 into tlie computation of agricultural wealth. The wliole prob- 

 lem which the farmer must solve, is substantially this : How 

 to secure the greatest quantity of the most available and best 

 productions from every foot of cultivated land, without detri- 

 ment to the soil. Any one who thinks that this problem can 

 be solved without patient, aye, and laborious thinking, or that 

 there is no room here for head-work of the raciest kind, is a 

 knoiv nothing', without belonging to any particular political 

 party. 



Now, it is by no means proved to a demonstration, that man- 

 kind has compassed the most fundamental part of this proposi- 

 tion, the annual cropping of the land without its impoverishment. 

 Nature's system of agriculture produces stalwart oaks and lofty 

 pines, luxuriant maples, spreading elms, and lithe birches, and 

 yet the soil beneath them daily grows richer. Indeed, so much 

 of vegetable life depends upon the gases, and these, extracted 

 from the air, do so much to form the substratum of the perish- 

 ing fabric, that, when the tree drops its robes of freshness and 

 beauty in the autumn, the decaying leaves may yield more than 

 they had received. But man is no such husbandman. He 

 boasts every year of more acres reclaimed — that is, brought 

 under his subjection, to be cheated out of their strength, and, 

 in a familiar old phrase, " to be carried to mill in corn-sacks." 

 When he has worn out his fields, he is mean enough to leave 

 them to nature's kinder treatment, and allows them, in neglect, 

 to lie fallow as pastures, and fatten slowly on air. 



Any one can dig, trench and manure, and plant, weed and 

 gather the harvest ; if these processes cover the province of 

 agriculture, it is plain to see, that art has contrived to do most 

 of this work by machinery. Indeed, this fertile age of 

 machinery is likely more than ever to infertilize our fields, by 

 making man more powerful, but not more thouglitful, and giv- 

 ing to New England and the West, the very element which has 

 cursed some other states, namely, unthinking labor — labor with- 

 out head-work. 



But there are generations to come after us ; and for these, if 



not for its own dignity, agriculture must be just, if not gener- 

 3 



