PRACTICABLE AND NECESSARY. 19 



tice of good husbandry were postponed, like the study 

 and practice of religion, ^ to a more convenient season.'' 

 This, sir, 1 sincerely believe, is a true and just explana- 

 tion of the complicated causes which have contributed to 

 enipoverish a vast portion of our lands, and much to my 

 shame and sorrow have I given it. But I have consola- 

 tion in feeling assured, that the dawn of a much better 

 state of things, — at least in regard to husbandry, — is now 

 shining in almost every part of our old State. I fear to 

 inquire how much is owing to the absolute necessity of 

 reform — how much to motives every way laudable, and 

 shall therefore content myself with the fact. There is, 

 however, one cause of the happy change with us, in regard 

 to the efficacy of which 1 feel so perfectly confident, that 

 I cannot omit to mention it. This is — the circulation 

 among us, of our friend Ruffin's Farmers' Register and 

 your Cultivator,* which have done more than every thing 

 else towards it. Both are read by great numbers of our 

 brethren, and have greatly contributed to awaken them to 

 a true sense of the vast losses they have sustained by 

 their long and destructive neglect of the study and prac- 

 tice of agriculture." 



Let not the Northerners take credit to themselves from 

 this outline of old Virginia husbandry, or from, the ingen- 

 uous detail of the causes which brought it to so low a 

 condition. Though not exactly the like causes have op- 

 erated, the same deteriorating system of husbandry has pre- 

 vailed with us, though perhaps to a more hmited extent. 

 Though we have personahy attended more to the art — 

 to the practice — yet we have been equally deficient in 

 the science with our brethren of Virginia — equally indif- 

 ferent to the study and application of the principles upon 

 which good husbandry must ever be based. And although 

 we may have begun earlier in the business of reform, 

 whether from necessity or from choice we will not say, 

 we are still too defective in practice to boast of our trivial 

 acquirements. Neither let him boast too soon who is 

 now luxuriating upon the fertile soils of the west, the ac- 



* At the date of this remark, nearly two thousand copies of the 

 Cultivator were circulated in Virginia. 



