THE AGRICULTURAL OUTLOOK, 51 



THE AGEICULTUEAL OUTLOOK. 



From an Address before the Hoosac Valley Agricultural Society. 



BY GEORGE B. LORING. 



While agriculture stands at the head of all our industries, 

 and is the occupation of the large mass of our people, its laws 

 are still vague, and even its position requires constant and 

 active defenders. Man has mapped out the heavens and 

 sounded the seas and explored the mineral wealth of the earth, 

 and understands all knowledge, but he is still groping for 

 definite agricultural rules — the fixed laws by which he can 

 cultivate the earth and increase his flocks and herds. Man, 

 moreover, has a natural love of land and of the harvest which 

 goes with it. It is not easy to tempt people away from a 

 fertile soil into manufactures or commerce. He who counts 

 his cattle by thousands and surveys a broad landscape of his 

 own acres, will not voluntarily leave all this and confine him- 

 self to a mill or a machine-shop. The associations of the 

 farm, too, are so attractive that man naturally tends thither 

 as to his home. And yet no occupation requires such defence 

 and eulogy as this. The work of the orator and writer are 

 in constant demand in its behalf. The ingenuity of the press 

 is taxed in its support. The most energetic societies are 

 established for its benefit. And all this appears to be neces- 

 sary, in order to develop all its capacity and to prevent a fatal 

 neglect of its interests. All men praise farming, but not all like 

 its toil. All Americans believe in the ownership of land, but 

 all do not believe in cultivating it as a means of subsistence. 

 And next to establishing the laws of the occupation in this 

 country, comes in the problem how to make agriculture so 

 uniformly profitable and so systematically easy as to attract 



