AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS. 365 



with these returns, which they consider a want of success in 

 farming, should have souglit new homes elsewhere. 



And yet this is not without a certain compensation. In 

 the population of all civilized countries two forces are con- 

 stantly at work, Avhicli, without much wresting of language, 

 may be called the centripetal and centrifugal motions. One 

 is a tendenc}^ in redundant outlying inhabitants, to centrali- 

 zation (or drawing into' cities and manufacturing towns a 

 portion cf this superfluity for work and wages) or to the 

 cultivation of lands in their immediate vicinity, to supply 

 the food-products necessar}^ to support this large non-pro- 

 ducing part of our population. The other, equally active, 

 and perhaps more potent in results, is the disposition to 

 migrate to l)roader fields and more untrammelled action. As 

 a farmer's sons attain to manhood, they feel that they must 

 do something for themselves. The paternal farm will not 

 usually bear dividing. Manly pride and inborn independ- 

 ence forbid their ccntinviance in service merely as "hired 

 men ; " and thus most of them must go elsewhere. Some are 

 content to try their fortunes in towns and cities where their 

 success is attested by the fact that more than four-fifths 

 of the most prosperous business men were raised on the 

 farm : others, with a larger ambition, strike out to make 

 themselves homes in new lands and among a sparse popu- 

 lation. 



Thus from this necessity — the impossibility of all remain- 

 ing at the old home — come the most successful men of the 

 towns ; and from the same source — New-England farms — 

 new States are settled, populated, and governed. 



An examination of the Federal census of 1830, and a com- 

 parison with it of the returns just collected by the census of 

 1880, show an increase in the population of the whole State, 

 during the past fifty years, of 1,172,604 ; and it also shows 

 a steady, almost unvarying increase, since 1770, in every 

 county in the State, with the exceptions of Barnstable, Dnkes, 

 and Nantucket, — never agricultural counties, and which 

 have lost during the past fifteen years, through the continued 

 depression and destruction of their fisheries, only about four 

 thousand. Although the counties have made steady gains, 

 it will not be supposed that all the towns in a county have : 

 some of them, on the contrary, have lost more than half the 



