216 SELECTIONS FROM ADDRESSES. 



our canals, wharves, and railroads. The quiet accumulations 

 of these small capitalists, in the Savings Bank of Boston, ab- 

 sorbed more than half a million of our bonds, and finished the 

 Western Railroad. 



At the commencement of .the railroad system, in New Eng- 

 land, some fears were entertained that the effect might be inju- 

 rious to the farms which encircle our metropolis. This opinion 

 was countenanced, for a brief period, by the competition of the 

 new milk-farms along the line of the Boston and Worcester 

 Railroad with the dairies in the suburbs, and by the depression 

 of agricultural products, through the country, which followed 

 the commercial revulsion of 1837. 



Doubtless, some changes were effected; but have not the sub- 

 urban dairy-farms been required for building-lots at treble prices ? 

 Are not the streets of the metropolis extended far into the coun- 

 try, on seven great lines; and is not land sold by the foot more 

 than ten miles distant from the Merchants Exchange of Boston 7 

 And are not farms, once supposed to be ruined by the location 

 of railroads, like the Winship and Hunnewell estates in Brighton 

 and Newton, at least quadrupled in their value? Have they 

 not shown that the railroad is, by no means, the road to ruin % 

 Do not milk, butter, corn, oats, pork, beef, command remuner- 

 ating prices, the latter in particular, and when you cannot buy 

 a sirloin in the Quincy market under a shilling a pound 1 If 

 occasionally, produce from the interior competes, in our market, 

 with that of farms in the vicinity, does it effect more than a 

 change of use, or of the course of cultivation, and does not the 

 increased size of the market draw in the market-wagon from a 

 larger circle ? Or, if any temporary depression occurs, are not 

 farms, in the outskirts of the counties around Boston, more ele- 

 vated than the adjacent farms are depressed ? 



What would be the position of the farms around Boston to- 

 day, if our railroads and inland marts had no existence ; were 

 we to banish the hundred millions of wealth, and the one hun- 

 dred thousand people which have accumulated in and around it 

 since the first movement in railroads, and send them to New 

 York and New Orleans, where they would have been planted 

 if such movement had not been made ? 



