LETTER TO 



And, where, I pray you, are you to get manure for 100 acres ? 

 But, supposing you to have it, do you seriously mean to tell us 

 that you will carry it on for two dollars an acre ? The carrying 

 on, indeed, might perhaps be done for that, but, who pays for the 

 filling and for the spreading ? Ah ! my dear Sir, I can well 

 imagine your feelings at putting down the item of dung-carting, 

 trifling as you make it appear upon paper. You now recollect 

 my words when I last had the pleasure of seeing you, in Catherine 

 Street, a few days before the departure of us both. I then dreaded 

 the dung-cart, and recommended the Tullian System to you, by 

 which you would have the same crops every year, without manure ; 

 but, unfortunately for my advice, you sincerely believed your land 

 would be already too rich, and that your main difficulty would be, 

 not to cart on manure, but to cart off the produce ! 



1005. After this, it appears unnecessary for me to notice any 

 other part of this Transalleganian romance, which I might leave 

 to the admiration of the Edinburgh Reviewers, whose knowledge 

 of these matters is quite equal to what they have discovered as to 

 the Funding System and Paper Money. But when I think of the 

 flocks of poor English Farmers, who are tramping away towards 

 an imaginary, across a real land of milk and honey, I cannot lay 

 down the pen, till I have noticed an item or two of the produce. 



1006. The farmer is to have 100 acres of Indian corn, the first 

 year. The minds of you gentlemen who cross the Allegany 

 seem to expand, as it were, to correspond with the extent of the 

 horizon that opens to your view ; but, I can assure you, that if 

 you were to talk to a farmer on this side of the mountains of a field 

 of Corn of a hundred acres during the first year of a settlement, 

 with grassy land and hands scarce, you would frighten him into 

 a third-day ague. In goes your Corn, however ! &quot; Twenty 

 &quot; more : kill em ! &quot; Nothing but ploughing : no harrowing , 

 110 marking ; and only a horse-hoeing, during the summer, at 

 a dollar an acre. The planting is to cost only a quarter of a dollar 

 an acre. The planting will cost a dollar an acre. The horse- 

 hoeing in your grassy land, two dollars. The hand-hoeing, which 

 must be well done, or you will have no corn, two dollars : for, in 

 spite of your teeth, your rampant natural grass will be up before 

 your corn, and a man must go to a thousand hills to do half an acre 

 a day. It will cost two dollars to harvest a hundred bushels of 

 corn ears. So that here are about 400 dollars of expences on the 

 Corn alone, to be added. A trifle, to be sure, when we are looking 

 through the Transalleganian glass, which diminishes out-goings 

 and magnifies incomings. However, here are four hundred 

 dollars. 



1007. In goes the plough for wheat ? &quot;In him again ! Twenty 

 &quot; more ! &quot; But, this is in October, mind. Is the Corn off ? It 

 may be ; but, where are the four hundred zuaggon loads of corn 

 stalks ? A prodigiously fine thing is this forest of fodder, as high 

 and as thick as an English coppice. But, though it be of no use 



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