656 



FARMERS' REGISTER. 



[No. 11 



I verily believe, that we have had to p;iy from ihe 

 want of proper legislative aid to agrifiilture : l()r 

 although I ym fully aware thai legislation can nei- 

 ther prevent bad seasons, nor the thousand other 

 natural ills that agriculture is heir to, yet I am 

 equally well aware that, if she had received that 

 md ever since she first wanted it, all the ills she 

 has suffered might have been so iruarded against 

 as always to protect om- country fi'oni the necessi- 

 ty of importing any of her daily bread from other 

 countries. The worst that could have happened 

 to us would have been a brielj temporary lailure 

 to export grain. 



The nevvs[aper statement which you all have 

 probably seen on lliis subject, fiills iar, very tar, 

 short of the truth ; but detective as it really is, it 

 contains matter of the deepest possible interest 

 to the whole American nation. Yet, most strange 

 to say, it has not elicited, so far as I have seen or 

 heard, one solitary comment l>om any one of the 

 whole editorial corps. If it has, I beg their par- 

 don. It would seem, therefore, as if tiie how and 

 by whom our fifteen or sixteen millions of Jiillow- 

 citizens are fed, were matters to most of these 

 gentlemen, of supreme indifference ; or, at least 

 far less to their la^te than stories of sea snakes 

 and great squirrel hunts, of steamboat disasters, 

 big pumpkins, and gigantic men ; or a tale of 

 some poor uidi)rtunate women having four or five 

 children at a birth, " all hale and hearty ;" or of 

 slabbing matches, murders and sudden deaths of 

 persons whose names even are not known to one 

 in five hundred of their readers. To gef hold of 

 any of these marvels for their papers, and give it 

 a run from Passamaquoddy to Key West, and 

 from the shores of the Atlantic to the Rocky 

 Mountains, in preference to any other topics, 

 should not excite our surprise, when vve reflect, 

 that it saves them, lor weeks and months togeth- 

 er, the labor of bestowing so much as a single 

 thought upon those great elements of social hap- 

 piness and imfjrovement — manners, morals, and 

 education. That such should be the perversion 

 among us. of the periodic press, is deeply to be 

 deplored; for lew things contribule more to lower 

 and vitiate the public taste, than thus feeding it 

 with the utterly worthless food of mere idle curi- 

 osity, rather than that kind of intellectual aliment 

 which, if properly administered, would make 

 men and nations what thoy ought to be. It is 

 true, that among our hundreds of newspaper 

 editors, we have many honorable exceptions to 

 the foregoinij remarks, and I take much pleasure 

 in thus publicly declaring the fact. But lew, even 

 of thesc/.ive altogether innocent of having contribu- 

 ted far more than they need have done, towards 

 poisoning the mind with party-politics, and thereby 

 disiraciinur it quite as nmch as in.irvellous tales 

 have done, fi-om that unceasing attention to all 

 those grand objects of universal interest which most 

 contribute to elevate both individuals and nations 

 to their highest state of attainable |)erfection. 



Let us not however dismiss this subject of our 

 becoming importers instead of exporters of such 

 enormous quantilies of food for man and beast, 

 without a few additional remarks. 



Whence have we procured this vast amount of 

 grain — costing a sum, one moiety of which would 

 amply have sutTiced to pay for an ao;iicu!tural 

 survey of the whole inhabiteci part of the union 

 — to establish a Board of Agriculture and experi- 



mental farms in each state, and to endow an agri- 

 cultural prolessoiship in the university or princi|;ul 

 college of each? Whence have we procured il? 

 Why, fi'om countries whose governments have, 

 for centuries, been zealously acting upon that 

 great truth in political economy, that if any of the 

 arts of life recjuired legislative aitl, it was that art, 

 upon the prosperity of which, every other abso- 

 lutely depended for its iiealthful existence — need 

 I say, it is the art of good husbandry, in all its 

 branches, and especially of aiiricullure? But we 

 who claim to be fiir ahead of every nation upon 

 earth, m the sciem-e and practice ot' government, 

 are living upon their bread, thereby heaping up 

 bodily strength to reiterate our own rain boastings 

 overtliem; boastings thai degrade u3, in this res- 

 pect, below even the canine species — ibr a dog 

 never barks at the hand that leeds him. The 

 countries which are now supplying us with so 

 alarming a portion of our daily food are incompa- 

 rably more populous tlian ours, and therefore, had 

 our airricullnral p>olicy been equal to theirs, must 

 still have been, as they once were, tributary to us 

 for a portion of their grain, since our means of 

 subsistence would always be greater in propor- 

 tion to our population than theirs, until the ratio 

 between the inhabitants and the cultivated land 

 became the same in both. But they have long 

 been encouraging their agriculture by all the legis- 

 lative means which their wisdom and patriotism 

 could devise; whilst, vve alas I instead of imitating 

 so wise and patriotic an example, have been ex- 

 hibiting to the wliole civilized world the extraor- 

 dinary, nay, the solitary spectacle of a great na- 

 tion, (great at least in numbers,) apparently re- 

 gardless, utterly regardless of what every other 

 nation upon earth has long cherished as the chief 

 — the most productive and important, by far, of all 

 the sources of national independence, wealth and 

 prosperity! If this he not true, literally true, let 

 any man show me even so much as one solitary 

 clause of a law, passed either by congress, or the 

 legislature of Virginia, directly in favor of agricul- 

 ture, or having anything mure than a remote be- 

 neficial bearing on her interests, and I will most 

 cheerfully retract what I liave said; for it gives tne 

 severe pain to contemplate the causes of my coun- 

 try's misfortunes, and no pleasure to find myself a 

 true prophet in regard to their liital consequences. 

 The real friends, the genuine patriots of Virginia 

 and of the United States, should seek for other 

 employment lor their thoughts, and zealously oc- 

 cupy them on subjects of infinitely greater im- 

 portance than their own comparative sagacity in 

 discovering why we the people are sick, and who 

 has made us so. Sick u-e are, and sick we are 

 likely to be, until we cease to quarrel about which, 

 doctor has most contributed to Ihe national malady. 

 The patient must die, unless both, (discarding all 

 prolt'ssional pride,) will punctually labor, heart 

 and soul, to discover and administer the means of 

 radical cure. This would be a contest — a giori- 

 rious rivalry every way worthy of statesmen and 

 patriots; for the gain of the victors would be the 

 gain of all; and the blessed li-uits of their victory 

 would be enjoyed in the remotest extremities of 

 our union. Noionly would agriculture begin once 

 more to smile; to fill our granaries with food for 

 man and beast, and to adorn our fields with ver- 

 dure; but every other trade, profession and calling, 

 would flourish to the utmost, until our dear country 



