10 Address. 



fclie census of 1870, showed a similar condition of things to those 

 which I have shown in these tables for 1880. 



Capital is usually not so productive in the East as in the West. 

 Rates of interest are much lower, and there is a steady flow of capital 

 westward for investment. There are no figures by which the ulti- 

 mate clear profits of farming can be estimated in the gross. The 

 question is a most complicated one, and we lack data. Farmers live 

 on their land and some live much better than others. Then too, in 

 a new region, the land is rising in value faster than in old communi- 

 ties. The only figures we have in this direction is to compare the 

 average productiveness of farming capital in crops. If, therefore, 

 we take the total farming capital in each of these several States, and 

 compare it with the " value of all farm productions," we find that 

 the production to each thousand dollars of capital used in the re- 

 spective States, is, in even dollars : 



Indiana, $158 



Massachusetts, 147 



Ohio, 124 



We see, as might be expected, that capital is invested in farming 

 at a better advantage in the western States, but there are other con- 

 siderations which I cannot notice, and I will not discuss why all of 

 the States in this list are below the average for the whole country. 

 We see from all this that in obedience to the law of adaptation, that 

 I spoke of in the beginning, New England agriculture has already so 

 far adapted itself to the new condition of things that it makes a very- 

 respectable showing. 



I will now illustrate the same thing iD another way, and one in 

 which there is still more popular misapprehension than in the matter 

 of the comparative productiveness of eastern and western farms. We 

 often hear that New England once grew grain enough for its own 

 bread, and that now it grows scarcely any at all. To be sure, it once 

 grew its own bread ; it had to or go without. But what kind of 

 bread was it ? New England was never, as a whole, a good region for 

 wheat. " Rye and Indian" was the bread on which the early New 

 Englander had to rely. Read over the story of Colonial days, or of 

 the period before the opening of the Erie canal, and we will find 

 that for two hundred years wheat bread was a luxury rather than the 

 " daily bread" of the masses. But the actual decline in grain grow- 

 ing in New England is much less than is popularly believed. We 

 have no full statistics reaching back to Colonial days, but if we take 

 "rhe aggregate amount of grain grown in these two States at the 



