CHAPTER V. 



The Agricultural Industry. 



Although agriculture was the chief means whereby more than 

 90 per cent of the inhabitants of southern New England got their 

 living, yet it was most inefficiently, and, to all appearances, care- 

 lessly conducted. Very little improvement had been made over 

 the primitive methods employed by the earliest settlers. As soon 

 as the pioneer stage had been passed and the clearing of the land 

 had been accomplished, the colonists settled down to a routine 

 husbandry, based largely on the knowledge and practices of English 

 farmers of the early seventeenth century, but in many ways much 

 less advanced than the agriculture of the motherland even at that 

 early date. In the century and a half intervening between the 

 settlement of New England and the opening of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, improvements of far-reaching significance had been introduced 

 in English agriculture, through the work of Tull, Bakewell, Towns- 

 hend. Coke, and Arthur Young. The knowledge of these changes 

 had spread quickly to this side of the Atlantic,^ and yet the bulk 

 of the farmers had shown no disposition to adopt the new methods. 

 On their poorly cultivated fields little fertilizer of any sort was used, 

 their implements were rough and clumsy, live stock was neglected, 

 and the same grains and vegetables were raised year after year with 

 little attempt at a rotation of crops, until the land was exhausted. 



Contemporary Criticism. 



The apparent lack of intelligence, and of any progressive spirit, 

 exhibited by the New England farmers drew severe comment from 

 both native and foreign observers. General Warren of Massachu- 

 setts,^ for example, writing in the American Museum in 1786, drew 

 a sharp contrast between the methods prevailing at home and in 



' See infra, pp. 346-347. 



'The author of this letter was probably James Warren, 1726-1808, of Ply- 

 mouth, Mass. He succeeded General Joseph Warren as president of the Provin- 

 cial Congress, after the latter's death at Bunker Hill, fought through the Revolu- 

 tion, and was later made a major-general of militia. See Appleton's Encyclo- 

 pedia of American Biography, VI. 364. 



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