102 THE MASSACHUSETTS SOCIETY 



such a course of remark should not be attributed to 

 any want of honor or respect for the farming interest. 

 Whatever tends to stimulate and direct the industry of 

 our farmers, whatever spreads prosperity over our 

 fields, whatever carries happiness to the home and 

 content to the bosoms of our yeomanry, tends more 

 than everything else to lay the foundations of our 

 republic deep and strong, and to give the assurance of 

 perpetuity to our Hberties. 



The errors and deficiencies of our practical agricul- 

 ture may be referred in a general survey with sufficient 

 accuracy to tv/o sources, the want of scope of view 

 among our farmers and the want of system in their 

 plans. Those to which I shall allude will not be such 

 as require any extent of capital to rectify. All that 

 will be requisite is a little more of that industry of 

 which our farmers have already so much, or that 

 industry a little differently directed. It is not by great 

 and splendid particular improvements that the inter- 

 ests of agriculture are best subserved, but by a general 

 and gradual amelioration. Most is done for agricul- 

 ture when every farmer is excited to small attentions 

 and incidental improvements; such as proceed, for 

 instance, from a constant application of a few plain 

 and common principles. Such are, that, in farming, 

 nothing should be lost, and nothing should be 

 neglected ; that everything should be done in its proper 

 time, everything put in its proper place, everything 

 executed by its proper instrument. These attentions, 

 when viewed in their individual effect, seem small, but 

 they are immense in the aggregate. When they be- 

 come general, taken in connection with the disposi- 

 tions which precede and the consequences which in- 

 evitably follow such a state of improvement, they 

 include, in fact, everything. 



Scope of view in a general sense has relation to the 

 wise adaptation of means to their final ends. When 

 applied to a farmer it implies the adaptation of all the 



