MARYLAND AND VIRGINIA. 477 



but rarely to take into consideration our common interests ; and when we do meet, we re- 

 main together too short a time to oi-igiuate or perfect any gi-eat measure of general improve- 

 ment. In pui-ely agricultural districts, thei-efore, the products of industrj' find their way to 

 market by miserable roads and circuitous lines of communication, to the great loss and in- 

 convenience of the fanner." 



Let us suppose two farmers, each with an estate of equal extent and fertility, 

 the owners equal in management and intelligence — but one of them has within 

 a mile a miller to grind all and his family to eat a part of his corn ; the tanner 

 to buy his hides and to buy his pork in return ; the shoemaker to make his 

 shoes and buy his milk ; the weaver to sell him cloth and lauy his wool ; while 

 the other would have to send his corn to be ground and his hides to be tanned, 

 and his leather to be made into shoes, and his wool to the stapler at a distance 

 of 100, or 50, or even 20 miles, what would be the difference it would make in 

 the intrinsic value of the two estates ! What would be the cost in time, in labor 

 and in manure, that one would have to pay or to lose over the other ? Well, will 

 not what applies in this way, to an individual farmer and his family, and his 

 interests, apply to a whole nation of producers that have to send to foreign countries 

 for what they want? — for a nation, after all, is but an aggregation of families. 

 Free Trade would be very well, if all nations composed one Government, bound 

 by a common interest, and its action had in view the welfare of the majority of 

 the whole ; but we must take the world as we find it, and as it is, no one of 

 them can control another ; and in this war of interests, the one that undertakes 

 to play the liberal and magnanimous must expect to be sacrificed. The one 

 that makes its agricultural prosperity depend on the arbitrary policy of foreign 

 Governments, puts itself in the Avorst of all conditions — one of perpetual uncer- 

 tainty and fluctuation, liable to have all its courses of industry disturbed by 

 alien mfiuences over which it has no control. There are countries so small, 

 with climates and resources so limited, that they are compelled to rely on inter- 

 national exchanges. In that respect ours is essentially distinguished from others, 

 for there is nothing except tea and coffee that we might not make, and these are 

 not quite necessaries of life, and if they were we have enough to spare to give 

 in exchange, on terms of mutual advantage. 



Let it not be said that the causes Avhich depress the Agriculture, and drive 

 away the emigrants and the population from Maryland and Virginia, and the 

 Southern States, are of universal prevalence and beyond the reach of cure : such 

 is not the fact. The evil which does not, as most of it does, spring from defec- 

 tive national legislation, is of local and peculiar character, whatever it be. Look 

 for a moment how it exhibits itself in States of the same age, and resembling 

 each other in some of the principal features of their geographical position. Com- 

 pare, for example, Maryland and Massachusetts, the two oldest sisters of the 

 Republic — born about the same time, of the same parents, and pretty much the 

 same education — with difference of religious training equal to that between 

 tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee. They took a fair start ; and now let us see how 

 they get along in the race. Let us see whether one does not seem to have been in 

 charge of some young greenhorn, just come upon the turf. The other under 

 the instructions of " old Nap," Col. Johnson himself, with Archy Taylor for his 

 trainer. Here they go, then. Maryland at the first jump spreads herself over 

 7,040,000 acres. Massachusetts, like little Trifle, covers, as she stands, but 

 little over half as much ground— 4,640,000 acres. Maryland mild in climate, 

 scarcely any winter, soil easily worked, free from stone, and responding quickly 

 to good treatment — Massachusetts naturally cold, hard, hilly, stony and sterile. 



(917) 



