356 CONDITION OF AGRICULTURE 



wheat it could send us was without bounds — and that if 

 those who tilled the land and raised the corn in these 

 countries were not so skilful as the average of our own 

 farmers, this was only another evidence that nature there 

 was kinder to the tiller of the soil than she is in our own 

 country, and did not demand at his hands either the 

 same amount of knowledge, or the same unwearied 

 application of ceaseless toil. 



One of my objects in visiting North America was to 

 remove the mistiness of my own ideas as to the agricul- 

 tural character and condition of its several great regions, 

 to test the seeming exaggerations in which, as if by some 

 natural law, the natives and residents of this northern 

 part of the Ncav World are inclined to indulge. I was 

 desirous, also, of obtaining a clear idea of the relation 

 which American practice bears to English practice; the 

 prospects and success of Individual American to those of 

 individual English and Scotch farmers ; American past 

 and future surplus wheat to the state and demands of the 

 English market; the life of the settler in these new 

 countries to the life he would have led had he remained 

 at home. On a few of these points I have arrived at 

 clear and definite notions — not hastily, I believe — though 

 some of them may still be incorrect. It is some remarks 

 upon these I wish briefly to put down in this place. 



And first, as to the condition of agriculture as an 

 art of life, it cannot be denied that, in this region, as a 

 whole, it is in a very primitive condition. Before the 

 first Puritan emigrants landed at Plymouth, the Indians 

 planted and hoed and reaped their corn much as the 

 white settlers do now, and, like them, deserted old land 

 for new when the crops began to fail. Many operations, 

 it is true, are now performed upon existing farms which 

 were unknown to the Indian races ; but a similar absence 

 of skill and forethought is generally observable in refer- 

 ence both to the mode of performing them and to their 



