272 FAILING GROWTH OF WHEAT. 



years ago, used to be cultivated in much larger 

 proportion than now. 



But it cannot surprise any Old Country farmer that 

 the wheat crops should become less valuable, even on 

 the best of land, where so little has been done to 

 conserve the natural capabilities of the soil. In Prince 

 Edward's District — a peninsula lying immediately to the 

 west of Kingston, between the Bay of Quinte and the 

 lake — the land has, in some places, been cropped with 

 wheat for fifty years, without any other manure than a 

 ton of gypsum a-year applied to a whole farm. In 

 other places, a similar system has been followed. Can it 

 be wondered at, then, that here, as elsewhere — from 

 this among other causes — the wheat-producing region 

 should be gradually retiring inland, or farther to the 

 west; and that, as in the State of New York, the 

 agriculture of the whole province should, by degrees, be 

 materially altering? It is the multiplied and prolonged 

 modes of procedure of its individual citizens that, in 

 agriculture as in the arts, ultimately determines the 

 nature and extent of the relations, economical and 

 commercial, which one country bears to another. These, 

 in the case of the North American provinces and States, 

 are leading to a condition of agricultural production 

 which is of the greatest possible interest to British land- 

 owners and land-cultivators. 



Little knowledge of improved agriculture has hitherto 

 been diffused in Upper Canada ; and it is, as yet, among 

 practical men, held in little esteem. In revenge, the 

 farming class are not, as a body, regarded with much 

 estimation by the other classes of society. They do not 

 assume their proper position among a community where, 

 if they only knew how to use it, all political power is, in 

 reality, in their hands. The knowledge which they despise 

 would be the means, not only of enabling them to wield 

 this power, but of placing themselves in that position in 



