38 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICXJLTURE. 



be a blessing to the land, conducive to productiveness, intelli- 

 gence, virtue, and loyalty to republican ideas. We long hoped 

 that this truth would become evident to these proprietors them- 

 selves, who were so proud of their monopoly of all the intelli- 

 gence, and all the freedom, and all the nobleness of the land, 

 as well as of all the land itself; and that considerations of 

 political economy, of justice, of humanity, and of religion, 

 would ultimately lead them to adopt more reasonable, righteous, 

 and republican social institutions and forms of industry : but 

 we were mistaken. Providence has brought the matter to 

 another issue, and these overgrown aristocratic estates must be 

 carved into smaller republican farms by the sharp sword of war. 



The nutritive productiveness of the earth is affected, more- 

 over, by the cultivation of unnutritious products. I do not refer 

 to products which, though they do not furnish food for man, 

 yet minister to his wants and his comfort, such as cotton, flax, 

 and other articles which are manufactured into clothing, and 

 used in various other ways conducive to human civilization and 

 progress. These are only in one degree less necessary than the 

 products which go directly to sustain the life of man. I refer 

 rather to those growths of the soil which are either absolutely 

 pernicious, or at least useless, and to those which are perverted 

 to pernicious uses. Large tracts of productive land are occu- 

 pied with crops of this kind. 



In the United States, the land devoted to the culture of 

 tobacco is more than twice the amount that is occupied with 

 the cultivation of rice, (400,000 acres : 175,000 acres,) and 

 nearly half as much as that improved in raising beans and pease. 

 In England, the land appropriated to raising grain for the 

 manufacture of malt and distilled liquors would more than 

 suffice to produce all the wheat which that country now impocts ; 

 and this last use of it in place of the former, besides saving the 

 country the 180,000,000 or 1100,000,000 which she now pays 

 annually for foreign wheat and flour, would increase the 

 industry and thrift of her laboring class, and greatly diminish 

 intemperance and pauperism. Millions of fertile acres in the 

 Turkish Empire, and in British India, are occupied with the 

 opium poppy ; and the manufactured product goes to diminish 

 the productive industry of every country where tlie drug is iu 

 common use, as it is throughout almost all southern Asia. 



