AGRICULTURE AND THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS. 11 



the earth that would achieve greatness, that prosecutes an agri- 

 culture more wasteful, improvident and reckless of the indispen- 

 sable conditions of an enduring fertility of the soil. We have 

 ravaged the continent like an enemy's territory. With the axe 

 and with fire we have hewn down and burned away the primitive 

 growtlis of the valley, the hillside and the prairie. Crop by 

 crop, we have drawn from the earth its precious minerals, and 

 borne them hundreds and thousands of miles to distant cities, 

 across the continent, over the ocean, and never returned again, 

 them or their equivalents ; until at last, exliausted of its trea- 

 sures, it refuses longer to yield the abundant harvest of its prime, 

 and lapses through successive stages of deterioration into impov- 

 erishment, unfruitfulness, and sterility. The failing crop, instead 

 of stimulating the American farmer to seek a remedy in an 

 improved system of culture, too often prompts him to abandon 

 the lands he has reclaimed from the wilderness, and sends him 

 out in search of fresh fields and pastures new, on which to repeat 

 the process of devastation. From New England, he migrates to 

 New York, from New York to Ohio and Wisconsin ; and now 

 Ohio complains of abandoned farms and of migrations to the 

 West. Under this system, while with the increasing acreage 

 brought under cultivation, the aggregate product of the country 

 has immensely increased, lands which half a century ago were 

 unsurpassed in productiveness, and seemingly inexhaustible, > 

 have visibly deteriorated. Whole States have been impoverished. 

 In our own Commonwealth, the average of the crops of corn, 

 wheat, rye, barley, oats and hay, was quite low in 1807, but it 

 was some fifteen per cent, lower in 1855. In New York, where 

 the average crop of wheat eighty years ago was from twenty-five 

 to thirty bushels, it is now only fourteen bushels per acre. Ohio, 

 which eighty years ago presented to the farmer a rich unbroken, 

 soil in the wild state of nature, now yields a diminishing aver- 

 age per acre of twelve bushels of wheat. In 1850, the average 

 yield of wheat per acre did not exceed seven bushels in Virginia 

 and Nortli Carolina, and five bushels in Alabama. 



It is a well authenticated fact, that of the one hundred and 

 sixty-three million acres of improved land in the United States, 

 three-fourths receive no return of the necessary elements of 

 vegetable growth that are carried off by the annual harvest. A 

 distinguished agriculturist calculated in 1850, the annual waste 



