UTILIZATION OF LABOR. 59 



proof of Yankee skill in wringing from a scanty soil the 

 choicest fruits and golden corn. Luxuriant crops and the 

 finest of herds and flocks are here on exhibition. And if we 

 have not the abundance of our Western brothers, we glory in 

 our crops as the product of thought and labor. 



The time is coming when the deep soils of the West and 

 South will have yielded their superabundant riches, and, like 

 New England, their soil will demand the fostering care of agri- 

 cultural science. The time is near at hand, when those broad 

 plantations, once growing poorer under the impoverishing curse 

 of slavery, and the rich prairie, starved by years of robbery, 

 will be the homes of busy millions, a crowded population cut- 

 ting them into small farms, and reproducing in every part of 

 the national domain, something of the New England type of 

 life. This is inevitable under those wise laws that, forbidding 

 the entailment of land, subject it to the chance of sale and 

 division at least once in every generation. 



It is not then for New England alone, it is for this great 

 country of ours in its future, that we invoke all the aid that 

 science and skill can render to increase the fertility of our soil 

 and the variety and richness of our products, that within our 

 own borders may be found all that the highest civilization 

 demands, though the rest of the world were sunk beneath the 

 ocean or leagued together in arms against us. And where 

 shall we look for the field of investigation and the line of dis- 

 covery and invention that shall do for agriculture that which 

 has been done by science and inventive skill to utilize labor in 

 all the mechanical arts ? We want something more than 

 mowers, and reapers, and shellers, — something more than im- 

 proved implements for putting in and gathering crops. Our 

 fruits must be the most delicious, our grains the most prolific, 

 our herds and flocks must be the finest in form and quality. 

 In the improvement of all these lies the farmer's greatest 

 power for utilizing labor. He must know how to secure the 

 most productive soil and how to bring every product to the 

 highest standard of excellence. Just so far as he does this 

 does he render every blow he strikes more effective. But to 

 do all this he must enter a field of more difficult research than 

 the mechanical inventor can ever occupy, — a field requiring 

 the most accurately trained powers of observation and untiring 



