58 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



gathering harvests, increasing ten-fold the farmer's power to 

 rob his soil. In the garden States of the West, this process 

 may be long continued, but every year the product lessens and 

 the robbing process must finally come to an end. We may 

 feed the world with our grain and supply its busy looms with 

 cotton, but in more than one-half of our country we do the 

 work by sheer land robbery. Any process that yearly leaves 

 the soil poorer in materials for crops, is unworthy the name of 

 agriculture. 



And so it happens that no portion of our country is so favor- 

 ably situated for the increase and diffusion of agricultural 

 knowledge, as New England. Her soil is thin and rugged, and 

 her climate severe. It is impossible to live by land robbery here. 

 New-England soil is no long-suffering creditor. You must 

 make full returns for every crop you take, or your drafts are 

 protested at once. All the conditions of New England life as 

 well as the physical condition of its soil and climate, prevent 

 the Southern and Western methods of cultivation. A New 

 England farm would hardly be considered a respectable corn or 

 wheat field in the West. Narrowed down then, by the neces- 

 sity of the case, to a few acres, — having a soil that must be 

 carefully manured and tilled to produce a crop, — living in a 

 climate where winter reaches far into spring, and early frosts 

 often destroy the finest prospects of a harvest, having all these 

 adverse conditions to contend against, the New England farmer 

 has been compelled to work more with hand and head than any 

 other tiller of the soil in our land. These hard conditions are 

 the secret of the increase of agricultural knowledge among us. 

 The Western man wonders where our farms are found, — wonders 

 how we can live, — says that New England would have been left 

 to the bears and wolves if the West had been known to the 

 early settlers. But if he is a man of intelligence, he knows 

 that nowhere else in our land is the science of agriculture so 

 thoroughly understood and applied, as among the New England 

 hills and valleys. Had we been shut out from the fertile West, 

 we should have known more than we now do, and New England 

 soil would have been richer and more productive than it is 

 to-day. 



But we proudly point to the products that are now gathered 

 in every part of our State, from Plymouth to Berkshire, as 



