32 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



fruits of skies that ever smile and lands that ever bloom, 

 ignorance and itrdolence and pauperism, yet reared their heads 

 amidst all the long two centuries of your tillage. Your sons 

 have left your firesides to seek the broader and easier culture 

 of the West ; thither, as old England has sent her better breeds 

 of cattle, so New England has sent her better breed of men : it 

 remains to be proven whether in tlieir new abode the latter, 

 like the former, will improve upon the original type. 



If, then, the chief end of New England farming had been to 

 deal with men, mentally, something as Bakewell did with cattle 

 and sheep, physically, beginning from so excellent a starting 

 point, and furnishing for the free expansion of every native 

 energy, influences so bracing and self-sustaining, while we 

 might accord to such an agriculture, a rank still more exalted 

 than to that of the famous English breeder, — still, as our race, 

 unlike those in Bakewell's hands, is said to be perfected only 

 through much tribulation, we might not end by placing the 

 actual attractions of New England farming, for more selfish 

 purposes, in a very winning light. And it is with the other 

 and more immediate objects of the farm that we are to deal — 

 as the scene of toil, indeed, but as affording opportunities, 

 which we believe to be worthy of closer study and more zealous 

 exertion, of securing a fair reward for that toil — opportunities 

 moreover, which it is the design of a society like this to bring 

 to yet fuller development, and to place still more readily within 

 the comprehension and attainment of its members. 



It is the result of increasing experience in the capabilities of 

 a country, as it grows older, and the great principle of" division 

 of labor" becomes more generally recognized amidst a denser 

 population, to resolve the problem of the comparative purposes 

 to which the different parts are best adapted. Water does not 

 more surely tend to its own level, than do the various branches 

 of agriculture seek an equilibrium, provided there are cheap 

 and untrammelled channels of intercommunication and trans- 

 port, as there are among us. In this point of view, the history 

 of the farming of any one district or of the country as a whole, 

 might be rendered most instructive, if so written that we could 

 trace in it the various steps by which the present equipoise, so 

 to speak, has been arrived at, and ascertain more clearly what 

 are the essential, and what are merely incidental, conditions of 



