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cviniiot be pursued, because tbe soil and climate are not congenial to 

 the growth of all such grain. If so, let others be substituted ; but if 

 there be any point where grass of some kind cannot be raised, then it 

 had better be abandoned as an agricultural district, and appropriated 

 to some other i)urpose ; for it may be questioned wdiether anything that 

 grows out of tlie earth can be grown prolitably where grass will not 

 grow. Grass is the great renovator of the earth, and will always grow, 

 M'ith the use of lime, where land is worth cultivating. 



The marked contrast between the modes of culture of the farmer of 

 the North and planter of the South is not to be traced to any essential 

 difference iu the principles by which the cultivation of the earth should 

 gov^ern the one or the other, but is rather to be accounted for by the 

 circumstances of these localities. Climate has had much to do with the 

 subject, the character of labor more, and the education and habits of 

 the respective populations greatly conduced to the essential differences 

 in the practical operations of the farm. 



In the Southern States it is as uncommon to meet with a barn, as a 

 place of ])reparation of the i^roducts of the plantation, as it is in the 

 ISTorth to tind a farm Vvithout one. The planter contents himself with 

 the reflection that his cattle require no such shelter from the elements 

 with which he is surrounded ; while the farmer estimates his barn, not 

 oidy as a shelter for his cattle from wet and cold, but as a manufactory 

 of the only fertilizers upon which he relies to improve his land ; and 

 not only this, but as a place where his products are prepared for the 

 market without waste or deterioration, and from whence the straw, 

 hay, and fodder are distributed to the cattle for their comfort and for 

 the profit of the farmer. The southern planter will not realize the truth 

 of this, although he finds himself scattering over a thousand acres; 

 abandoning one spot with the hope of finding another less exhausted, 

 or perhaps somewhat rested from the fatigues of a series of crops of the 

 same thing; while the northern farmer, with his well-farmed hundred 

 acres, will be found to increase the fertility of his land and add to his 

 acres year by year. We have almost said that a barn is essential to 

 the operations of the farm ; that it is through its instrumentality that it 

 is fertilized and improved ; while the manure of the barnless plantation 

 is wasted upon the desert air. 



All other questions respecting the management and economies of 

 plantation or farm management resolve themselves into the considera- 

 tion of labor, its character and qualities. Our southern people are 

 essentially agricultural. They have had no other subsisting interests 

 to any extent. The existence of servile labor, imposed upon the minds 

 of the land-holders, made it a part of their earliest education that labor 

 was degrading. This was a necessary consequence of a system in which 

 men were born to command and obey. However well educated, their 

 minds were not turned to the subject of agriculture. They had no neces- 

 sity to investigate the practical workings of the plantation; that was 

 in other hands, whose special business it was to oversee as well the labor 

 as the laborer. But now there is a new state of things, wiien it will 

 become imperative upon the owners of estates to study agriculture as a 

 science, to think and plan for themselves, to devise their own modes and 

 schemes for the improvement of their lands and the economies of'using 

 hired labor. It does not necessarily follow that planters have suffered 

 anything in the change of the character of their laboring hands; expe- 

 rience has proved that they have lost few or none of them; and when 

 we remember the amount of work accomplished by one who earned at 

 most but a mer^ subsistence, who was engaged in a duty of which he 



