MADDER. [APRIL. 



acres, in which case the loss would have been no 

 trifle. And it surely is highly incumbent on every 

 one, to make known to the world such of his ex- 

 perience as will probably be of any use to it. Bad 

 success of several persons in a culture, is too apt 

 to prejudice others in general against it. How- 

 ever irrational, still it is so, and it ought to be a 

 caution not to recommend any thing in general, 

 under the extravagant notion, that because an arti- 

 cle of culture is profitable on one soil, it must be 

 the same on very different ones. But the grand 

 obstacle to -the culture of madder,, is the difficulty 

 of sale : for while a man has not a fair market 

 for his unmanufactured madder, none can with 

 any prudence engage in it, unless on so large a 

 scale as to admit the whole apparatus of reducing 

 it to such a state, as to be absolutely i marketable 

 commodity. In answer to this, it may be said, 

 that madder really dry is a marketable commodity* 

 But this matters not, if the purchaser has it in his 

 power to be a knave : he has a pretence, a screen 

 always at hand, that will cloak the greatest knavery, 

 and to a degree known in no other branch of agri- 

 culture. Among the gentlemen of trade who have 

 a mutual understanding and confidence, such ob- 

 jections appear trivial ; but to the cultivator, at a 

 distance from the market, it is a different affair. 

 He writes to a madder-merchant to know the price. 

 The answer is, four pounds an hundred weight. Up 

 he sends his madder, and instead of 4\. receives 

 but 3l. not from a variation in price, but in tc(.ig/it. 



It 



