LAND AND OTHER AGENTS OF PRODUCTION 195 



already moved from the flats of the Upper St. Lawrence to the Mis- 

 sissippi Valley, the north-and-south line which divided the wheat 

 product of the United States into two equal parts being approximately 

 the line of the eighty-second meridian. In 1860 it was the eighty- 

 fifth; in 1870, the eighty-eighth; in 1880, the eighty-ninth. 



Meanwhile, what becomes of the regions over which this shadow 

 of partial exhaustion passes like an eclipse in its westward movement ? 

 The answer is to be read in the condition of New England today. A 

 part of the agricultural population is maintained in raising upon 

 limited soils the smaller crops, garden vegetables and orchard fruits, 

 and producing butter, milk, poultry, and eggs for the supply of the 

 cities and manufacturing towns which had their origin in the flourish- 

 ing days of agriculture, which have grown with the age of the com- 

 munities in which they were planted, and which, having been well 

 founded, when the decadence of agriculture begins flourish the more 

 on this account, inasmuch as a second part of the agricultural popu- 

 lation, not choosing to follow the westward movement of the grain 

 culture, is ready with its rising sons and daughters to enter the mill 

 and the factory. 



Still another part of the agricultural population gradually becomes 

 occupied in the higher and more careful culture of the cereal crops on 

 the better portion of the former breadth of arable land, the less 

 eligible fields being allowed to spring up in brush and wood; deeper 

 plowing and better drainage are resorted to; fertilizers are now 

 employed to bring up and keep up the pristine fertility of the 

 soil. 



And thus begins the serious systematic agriculture of an old state. 

 Something is done in wheat, but not much. New York raised 

 13,000,000 bushels in 1850; thirty years later, when her population 

 has increased 70 per cent, she raises 13,000,000 bushels. Pennsyl- 

 vania raised 15,500,000 bushels in 1850, with a population of 2,250,000; 

 in 1880, with 4,500,000 inhabitants, she raised 19,500,000 bushels. 

 New Jersey raised 1,600,000 bushels then; she raises 1,900,000 now. 



More is done in corn, that magnificent and most prolific cereal; 

 more still in buckwheat, barley, oats, and rye. Pennsylvania, 

 though the tenth state in wheat production, stands first of all the 

 Union in rye, second in buckwheat, and third in oats; New York, the 

 same New York whose Mohawk and Genesee valleys were a proverb 

 through the world forty years ago, is but the thirteenth state in wheat, 

 but is first in buckwheat, second in barley, and third in rye. 



