314 BOAED OP AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



stupendous scale, that all the civilized world feels the effect of it. 

 Our increase of population has been unprecedented in the world's 

 history, and yet our food production has more than kept pace 

 with it. until now, the United States, according to Mulhall's tables, 

 {^Balance Sheet of the World, p. 38, 118,) grows 30 per cent, of the 

 grain and 30 per cent, of the meat of the world. One result of 

 this is, that " American Agricultural Competition" is a disturbing 

 element over nearly all of Europe in one way or another, causing dis- 

 tress on the farms of Great Britain and Ireland, solicitude in 

 France and Germany, and divers effects in various other countries. 

 In more than one place, the modern phases of this great fact are 

 producing a feeling of consternation as to what the ultimate re- 

 sult will be. 



But the new phases of this competition are not merely questions 

 between nations, but also between the different sections of the 

 United States. New England as well as Old England feels the 

 effects of agricultural competition with the wide and easily tilled 

 prairies of the West, and if this new competition produces less 

 distress here than there, it is because of the different systems of 

 land tenure and different social conditions, and not that the com- 

 petition is less sharp — in fact, it is sharper, for we have no 

 ocean between us and the fertile prairies. A barrel of flour is 

 brought from the mills of Minnesota to our own cities, for about 

 the same sum that a cartman charges for bringing it from the 

 nearest railway station to our own door. Illinois, Dakota, even 

 distant California and Oregon, are to-day in closer agricultural 

 competition with Connecticut, than Western New York or Penn- 

 sylvania, were within the memory of some of the persons who are 

 now listening to me. Such are the facts we have to face, and 

 to which we must adapt our Agriculture. 



Now let us for a moment consider some of the elementary 

 principles which underlie the matter, to better understand the 

 real nature of the problem that Connecticut farmers have to work 

 out. 



All the productive industries of civilization may be grouped in- 

 to four great classes which are very unlike each other in their 

 products, in their methods, in the principles regulating the 

 araouuts of their production, and indeed, in the very conditions of 

 their existence. They are Agriculture, Manufactures, Mining, 

 and Fisheries. Because Agriculture produces the food, it is more 

 intimately involved in all the problems of civilized society than 



