16 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



the fashioa to send our boys to school ten months in the year. 

 But it was not so, ladies and gentlemen, when sucli men as 

 George "Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, Daniel 

 Webster and Abraham Lincoln were boys. It was their train- 

 ing upon the farm that gave to them their stalworth forms, their 

 physical power, not only to sustain them in their mental efforts, 

 but to grapple successfully, aye, triumphantly, with the strong- 

 est intellects of their age. I next meet another delusion, I might 

 almost say a general hallucination, " that the West is the only 

 spot for farming," and this idea, Utopian as it is, is doing us 

 more harm than everything else. My farming interlocutor says 

 I should like to stop here. I love a New England home, dis- 

 like to leave parents and others to whom 1 am fondly attached, 

 the graves of dear friends, the old church and school-house, but 

 I must go where I get better crops, forty bushels of wheat or 

 eighty bushels of corn to the acre. 



I once chanced to hear a Western farmer explaining to a 

 candidate for emigration the astounding difference of crops in 

 the two sections. The AVestern prairie, for instance, grew eighty 

 bushels of corn to the acre, against forty here in Massachusetts, 

 which was not fit for a farmer, and to use his words, the sooner 

 he pulled up stakes the better. Seeing that the Illinoisian had 

 it his own way, and that my young friend was drinking it all up 

 as law and gospel, I ventured to ask the former somewhat as 

 follows : What do you get a bushel for your corn in Illinois, 

 average price ? Not obliged to sell it. Well, if you do sell it ? 

 Twenty-five cents at depot. Sometimes you cart it in the mud ? 

 Ye-e-s. You give to us forty ? Not always. It is notorious 

 that our river valleys grow as much corn to the acre as you 

 claim for the prairies — eighty bushels. Well, I give it up and 

 allow you an average of forty bushels. 



Corn raised here, I mean the good old yellow corn of Massa- 

 chusetts, is worth one dollar per bushel, cash, one year with 

 another. I had now, as you perceive, got |40 per acre against 

 his ^'10, to say nothing of the extra labor of harvesting, with 

 the privilege of getting the shakes to boot. It is easily cured 

 with quinine, never entirely. I hope sometime for leisure to 

 discuss more fully a market at your doors, or from 1,000 to 2,000 

 miles off. I mean with the jrivilegcs and comforts of life taken 

 into consideration ; not cabins, against our dwelling-houses, not 



