44 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



from the farm, of the money it has placed in their hands. If 

 instead of taking, dollar by dollar, all that can be scraped 

 together to buy stocks or mortgages, or venture into still more 

 speculative undertakings, such farmers would only calculate 

 the rate of interest they might obtain from a sufficient outlay to 

 bring some part of the farm every year into the highest con- 

 dition of productiveness of which it could be rendered capable, 

 until by degrees its whole surface and that of the township in 

 which it lies, should be thus gone over, the startling disparities 

 that now exist between the productiveness of your county of 

 Worcester and that of Ayr, would by degrees be vastly reduced, 

 and, unless I am much mistaken, your farmers here would in 

 tiie end discover that their investments were safer, their 

 interest larger, their farms still more rapidly appreciating in 

 value, and their eventual means of making outside investments 

 greater than at present. How many fields there are, now 

 grown up with coarse herbage and affording only a short and 

 poor pasturage, insufficient, very likely, to meet the actual 

 taxes assessed upon them, which a hundred or two dollars in 

 drainage, for example, might render the most productive part 

 of the farm, returning, thereafter, taxes, cost of labor, interest 

 on value and expenditures, and something beyond. How far 

 short is a large part, not of this county alone, but of the whole 

 State and country, of being in that condition which any practi- 

 cal farmer will recognize as the best, either for permanent grass 

 or for a rotation of tillage crops — but which, how many farmers 

 who know well enough by what means that condition is to be 

 attained — whom I would not for a moment think of attempting 

 to instruct in any of the secrets of their business — are con- 

 tented not to reach, dreading the outlay required, because the 

 returns seem distant, — preferring to send their money, very 

 possibly, "out West" at one or two per cent, a month, and 

 pinch the farm forever tighter and tighter because that money 

 don't get back from its Western tour at all. Such, giantlemen, 

 is the fact, alas ! of multitudes of investments outside the farm ; 

 if the fai'mer understands his business, should not his endeavor 

 be, like that of the merchant or the manufacturer, to go on 

 investing capital in it, until its machinery everywhere runs as 

 smoothly, and its working powers are as greatly perfected, as 

 capital can make them ? Tiie larger the scale also upon which 



