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• sounder judgment and less zeal without knowledge. Few have yet learned the logic 

 of statistics, and some even of our lawgivers are prone to build by proxy the frame- 

 work of their political economy, and liable to give it a fantastic and incongruous finish. 



THE BREADTH OF OUR STATISTICAL FIELD. 



When we consider that less than a third of the area of the States, and less than a 

 fifth of the entire domain of the United States, is mapped into farms, an:l remember 

 that of this farm-ai-ea only one-fourth is tilled or mowed; and when we further reflect 

 that the average yield per acre could be doubled if the many could be brought up to 

 the plane of the few in the practice of intensive culture, then we begin to realize what 

 numbers our country is capable of feeding, and what waste of toil and effort comes 

 from neglect of the economic lessons taught by the statistics of scientific agriculture. 



"We now know that our wheat occupies an area less than the surface of South Caro- 

 lina ; and, if the yield should equal that of England, half of that acreage would suffice. 

 AVe know of our national crop, maize, which grows from Oregon to Florida, and yearly 

 waves over a broader field than all the cereals beside, tha^ it covers a territory not 

 larger than the Old Dominion, and might produce its amplest stores within narrower 

 limits than the present boundaries of Virginia. The potato-crop could grow in the area 

 of Delaware, though yielding less than a hundred bushels per acre ; the barley for our 

 brewing requires less than the area of a half-dozen counties ; and the weed of solace, 

 sufficient to glut our owu and Earopeaa markets, is grown on tlie area of a county 

 twenty miles square. 



STATISTICAL TEST OF CURRENT PRACTICES. 



The dictum of the poet, " Whatever is, is right," must have in agriculture, as in morals, 

 a restricted acceptation. The prevailing practice may have au obvious and even a 

 specious reason for its existence, when its contravention by science and experimental 

 test is undeniable. We often fail to do what we know is best, because custom has 

 made easy wliat has become habitual. The deductions of agricultural statistics reveal 

 many a popular error or short-coming in agricultural practice. Perhaps I may not 

 better illustrate the province and proper use of this science than by a few examples 

 showing the prevalence of such miscouceiitiou and remissness in different sections of 

 our common country. 



THE WEAK POINT IN NEW ENGLAND AGRICULTURE. 



The average farmer of the Eastern States disregards the logic of facts which reveals 

 success only iu high culture. His brother of the West has cheap lands, very fertile, 

 easily worked, without obstructions interfering with the most varied employment of 

 agricultural machinery. His own lands may be low in price, because poor in plant- 

 food ; his sons have gone into trade and manufactures, and to virgin soils toward the 

 sunset ; his surplus earnings have gone to the savings-bank, or to Illinois or Kansas, as 

 a loan at 10 per cent., until, rheumatic, and decliuing with age, he finds production 

 also declining, his herds and flocks decreasing, and the couolusion inevitable that 

 " farming does not pay." Labor is scarce and high because in demand by other indus- 

 tries, which in turn offer high prices for farm-prodncts ; fertilization is needed every- 

 where, draining in many situations, and irrigation in some others. But these things 

 cost money, and he has neither the ambition nor the confidence for its expenditure, 

 and, worse still, in many instances the money is lacking. These may be potent 

 reasons for discouragement, but they do not prove that farming there, with money, 

 youth, enterprise, and skill, may not be highly profitable. And the teaching of 

 statistics, in examples of high success with high culture, disproves the current assump- 

 tion of unprofitableuess. There are numerous cases in which the gross return per acre 

 has been hundreds of dollars instead of tens. I know an instance there in which a 

 common vegetable, usually known in field-culture rather than in gardening, returned 

 in 1873 $12 for every day's labor expended on it. The lesson of statistics of Great 

 Britain, of Holland, of all countries of dense population, proves success to be only pos- 

 sible by enriching the soil and increasing the yield. Tliough Massachusetts farmers con- 

 stitute but one-eighth of the aggregate of all occupations, there is no reason why they 

 should not be able to feed all, if Great Britain with one-sixteenth of her population cau 

 furnish more than half her required food-supplies. And if, in the present state of Mas- 

 sachusetts agriculture, the value of her annual product be $U2 to each farmer, while 

 the cultivator of the rich prairie State, Illinois, earns but $.560, (and in point of fact it 

 is probable that unenumerated products of the former State would swell the total to the 

 latter figures,) then the results of intensive culture throughout the Commonwealth 

 would be comparatively munificent. This is a valuable lesson which New England 

 will ultimately learn from statistics, far more thoroughly than is now known and prac- 

 ticed by a few of her best cultivators. 



