18 IMPROVEMENT OF OUR AGRICULTURE 



and farmer, the Honorable James M. Garnett, of Vir- 

 ginia. In a letter to the writer of this essay, in reply to 

 some queries that had been addressed to him, he remarks : 

 " Your first question is, ' Have not successive crops 

 of wheat, of corn, of tobacco, greatly deteriorated some 

 of her once fertile soils ?' [alluding to Virginia.] And 

 your second is like unto it — ' Have they not reduced thou- 

 sands and tens of thousands, of her good acres, to com- 

 parative sterihty — to unproductive commons ?' To both 

 I reply — that we have, alas ! hundreds of thousands of 

 once good acres long ago reduced to ' comparative ste- 

 rihty,' but not to ' unproductive commons ;' for they still 

 produce what we call hengrass, broom-straw, and, ever 

 and anon, a starveling pine or cedar bush — the reproach- 

 ful and melancholy mementoes of ancestral improvidence. 

 But the successive crops to which you ascribe this, are 

 far from being the only, or the chief causes of the lamen- 

 table fact. From the first settlement of the country, un- 

 til within a few years past, the most deadly enemies to 

 good husbandry, in Virginia, have been — the utter neg- 

 lect of it as a science ; — the implicit adoption, by each 

 successive generation, of the practices of their 

 FOREFATHERS ; — the almost total neglect of manures — 

 except for gardens ; — the incessant alternate cropping 

 and grazing our lands without rest ; — the culture of 

 them in a certain rotation of icorkings without a due re- 

 gard to the condition of the soil, as to wetness or dryness. 

 But, above all, to the proprietors of this goodly soil 

 generally using it more as the means of gratifying their 

 appetites — their love of show, and the means of display- 

 ing it, than as sources of future comfort, respectability, 

 and happiness to their children, as well as of credit and 

 honor to their native State. The acme of ambition, in 

 the olden time, seemed to be, who should have the best 

 cheer, and the most company to consume it — Vvith little 

 or no regard to the ' material' of which it was composed ; 

 provided these ' Nate consumera fruges' were lovers of, 

 and tolerable contributors to, fun and frolic. As long as 

 the plantation held out in furnishing the means of this 

 ruinously-merry career, the troublesome study and prac- 



