REPOET OF THE COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE. 6 



A fourtli cause, attracting at this present time so manj honest sons of toil 

 from the farms and workshops of Europe to America, is the demand for gen- 

 eral labor, especially agricultural, owing to the vast number of our citizens now 

 in the army and navy, or who have perished in the defence of their country. 



And lastly, as the more general and positive cause of all, may be stated the 

 cheapness and fertility of some lands, and the cheapness and capability of 

 other lands, in connexion with the provisions of the homestead act, by which 

 the government oiTers, gratis, to each actual settler one hundred and sixty acres 

 of the best unappropriated laud. Besides this free grant, the government offers 

 vast tracts of land at $1 25 per acre, while improved or exhausted farms, in 

 all parts of our country, may be pm-chased on the most favorable terms. In 

 this connexion there are several topics worthy of most serious consideration, 

 and to which I desire briefly to call attention. 



Whatever, owing to the war and the march of events, may be the future 

 condition of laud and labor in the rebellious States, or the legal decisions of 

 the courts, arising out of confiscation, litigation, or the demands of the military 

 service, yet a great change must gradually take place, not only in the tenure 

 of the soil and its modes of culture, but in the people themselves and their 

 institutions. Much of the land will gradually pass out of the hands of its 

 present proprietors, either by purchase, the decision of the courts, or by the 

 force of circumstances. Many estates will be divided into smaller farms and 

 occupied by the humbler classes in the south, whites and freedmen, and by 

 industrious and enterprising settlers from the other States and from Europe. 

 The old fallacy, so long inculcated by politicians and accepted by the people 

 like many other fallacies respecting the south, that none but negrcfes can toil 

 there, will be thoroughly exploded during the present generation. Once divide 

 there the vast estates and elevate labor to its true dignity, by hiring instead 

 of owning it, and I venture the prediction that in less than ten years after the 

 close of the war, over a million of the industrial classes, native and foreign, will 

 have settled in the sunny south, making it teem with new beauty, progress, and 

 wealth. The tides of immigi-ation which now flow across the sea, and sweep 

 west and northwestward with such irresistible power, bearing and leaving in 

 their course the rich deposits of industry and art, of prosperity and life, will 

 then divide at the Alleghanies and equally enrich the hills, the valleys, and 

 savannas of the south. 



The great laws governing the flow of population are as palpable as those 

 governing the physical world ; and these laws should be studied and heeded 

 by our legislators if they desire to populate and develop equally every part 

 of oar country. Men who have been oppressed in the Old World, and have yet 

 manhood enough left to seek a free life in the New, will not settle in the mild 

 latitudes of the south, where labor is legally degraded, but go, though it be to 

 the forests and winter snows of the northwest, where labor is honorable in all 



Now, in respect to the south, with its magnificent zones of climate and natu 

 rally fertile soil, there is no question but that her agricultural products and 

 general prosperity will be vastly increased by the new condition of things im- 



