24 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



written an hundred and fifty years before a jenny or throstle 

 had been set to music, the intelligent student may find agricul- 

 tural science enough to supply the consumption of the time. 

 Tiiat which was wanted to awake empires from their rural 

 sleep, was not so much knowledge to guide, as a reorganisation 

 of pursuits to stimulate the inert and flagging energies of labor. 

 This great object began to be accomplished near the close of the 

 last century by the invention of labor-saving, labor-creating, 

 and labor-dividing machinery. By these agencies the indus- 

 trial reformation of the world was secured. Since time com- 

 menced there has been no such illustration of this truth, as is 

 found in the growth of the industry of Great Britain within the 

 last seventy-five years. Prior to 1766 her population, industry^ 

 and consumption had for a long period remained stationary. 

 But about that time a series of inventions and constructions 

 in mechanism opened, which have shed a lustre upon tlie powei" 

 of the race, and made the epoch in which they occurred mem- 

 orable in history, and in no respect more marked or visible than 

 by its effects upon agriculture. This procession of eveiits began 

 with the introduction of the spinning jenny brought out by 

 Hargreavos, and was followed by Arkwright, and Crompton^ 

 and Whitney, and by the efforts made all the while by Watt to 

 extend the application of steam to the movements of machinery. 

 The introduction of tliese machines and their associate accom- 

 paniments upon the theatre of labor, at such a juncture, appears 

 to have been one of those providential interpositions which 

 sometimes change the direction and destiny of men.. There 

 had been a pause in the industry of Europe, awaiting some 

 stimulant to production and consumption, which always act 

 with reciprocal beneficence upon each other. And the new 

 world beyond the main was then passing on to independence, 

 to the assertion of her own forces on the land and the sea ; and 

 precisely what was wanted, was a higher and larger application 

 of the useful arts, — a new enginery, — a now class of 'impulses, 

 — to luifold her career. The result has been accomplished in 

 both hemispheres. In Great Britain, under the impulse im- 

 parted by machinery and the more perfect division of labor 

 which followed, the public industry was raised as if by enc-hant- 

 ment. In thirty years the productive forces of the kingdoia 

 were tripled, and the country mounted to an elevation of inde- 



