AGRICULTURE AND THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS. 15 



and opens gaping scams which swallow up cities, are operations 

 in which she but combines and rccombines her everlasting 

 elements. An unending circle of self-adjusting change preserves 

 forever tlie balance of her stupendous harmonies. Nothing loses 

 a function except to gain one ; nothing comes to an end which 

 is not a beginning. Every stage is a stage of transition. All 

 things flow with the tide of time, and the current is continually 

 returning upon itself. The trees grow old and at last decay ; 

 their mould builds up the ascending columns of another wood. 

 By the processes of growth, the dust of the earth is upraised in 

 grains of wheat and corn. Wheat and corn, as food, are assim- 

 ilated by the organisms of animal life. Upon man and bird and 

 beast alike descends the inevitable decree, " Dust thou art, and 

 unto dust thou slialt return ; " and so the cycle of transforma- 

 tion is renewed. 



Where, then, among the forces of society, shall we seek the 

 principle, whose operation shall harmonize with nature's grand 

 economy, and be the basis of a system of agriculture that shall 

 be perpetual and self-sustaining in the elements of a fertile soil ? 

 The conscience of the individual is of too limited a scope to be 

 trusted to decide upon grounds of permanent well-being, the 

 issue in which present gain is met by a possible or prospective 

 loss to unborn generations. This principle, if found, will be 

 found most effectually established in the economy of the national 

 industry, and so established that 'the present shall not be called 

 to the difficult virtue of self-sacrifice, the resources of the future 

 shall not be endangered, and the very working of the farm shall 

 lay the foundation for still more abundant harvests. I find tlie 

 hint of the principle souglit in that rule of good farming which 

 enjoins the consumption upon the farm of the products of the 

 farm, and the selection for the market, not of the hay and 

 turnips, but the mutton and the beef. This economy, carried 

 out upon a national scale, would give us a distributed home 

 consumption of agricultural products, at diffused and accessible 

 centres of a diversified mechanical and manufacturing industry, 

 and of the commerce which such industry creates. For at 

 these centres the fertilizing constituents of the harvest accumu- 

 late. Rejected by the processes of consumption, still as suitable 

 for the crop as when deposited by the last inundation, they 

 become again available to all neighboring farms, to which they 



