AGRICULTUEE AND ^LA^NHOOD. 21 



have said for as^riculture, it is nevertheless true that farming 

 to-day is not Avhat reason teaches it ought to be. It is a busi- 

 ness of which the resources are yet latent, and they remain 

 latent in great part from the fact that mechanics and trade are 

 draining the farms of the chief enterprise of the country. 

 Young men aspire to some other business, at which they can 

 get rich faster, and thus farming is left to the unenterprising 

 and the immigrants. 



Farming requires the application of more thought. Thought 

 discovered a new Massachusetts under the old Massachusetts. 

 Thought has put the ploughshare beneath old New England, 

 developing the rich subsoil, so we have a new New England, 

 and this soil of the new New England is found to be richer than 

 that of the old New England. Drainage has discovered the best 

 soil where it was supposed nothing more useful than alders 

 would grow ; and irrigation defies the drought caused by the 

 clearing away of the forest. But there is another problem to 

 be solved. It is. What shall recompense the soil for the con- 

 stant drainage of her wealth in the products that go to supply 

 our manufacturing towns ? When we look into the East, at 

 the exhausted soil of Assyria, and then at the process that is 

 rapidly bringing our own soil into the same condition, the 

 contemplation seems alarming. Look at Boston with its 

 quarter of a million of inhabitants, besides the horses kept 

 there ; at New York with one million of inhabitants, and then 

 at the smaller cities and villages, and you see at once that 

 they are devouring all the wealth of the soil at a rapid rate, 

 because for all the provisions they take from the soil they 

 give nothing Imck ; but all the manure which should be pro- 

 duced by this consumption is carried off through the sewers 

 into that great washbowl — the sea. Here is a vital question, 

 upon which every other question that pertains to the w^ell- 

 being of humanity hinges. How shall this tide of sewage 

 be turned back to the soil whence it came ? Assyria gives us 

 the picture in her sparse, sick, starving inhabitants, of what 

 this whole beautiful continent, so full of health, wealth and 

 intelligence must, though not in our day, ultimately become, 

 unless some system of fertilization shall be developed, which 

 shall give the soil as much richness as has been taken from 

 it. If this process of exhaustion, now going forward, is 



