66 • MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



modes of culture, draining, use of most improved implements, 

 blooded and high grade stock, and getting information from the 

 experience of others as related in agricultural papers and books, 

 have been eradicated, and we are now prepared to go on develop- 

 ing ourselves and our farms as rapidly as possible, and we are 

 not prepared to say that we can discern the beginning of the end 

 when improvements in agricultural processes or results will 

 cease. 



Having arrived at this point in our progress, it is time for us 

 to consider what we have to accomplish, not merely as farmers, 

 but as men and philanthropists. Every man's pursuit is ennobled, 

 not only by the character of the work he is engaged in, but by 

 the object for which he works, and the one pursuit is as respec- 

 table as another, provided it is directed towards noble ends. 

 The man who lives but to continue without any definite object in 

 existence might as well be in one business as another ; he enno- 

 bles none and none shed lustre on him, because his purpose is 

 not defined. We have a mission, and it is of the highest im- 

 portance that we discern what it is, and in what manner we can 

 best promote its interests. 



As a nation we are an agricultural people, more so than any 

 other people in the world, and we are destined, not only to feed 

 untold multitudes on our own hemisphere, but to export food to 

 the wanting myriads across the oceans, who even now depend 

 upon our bread stuffs to eke out the measure which falls to them 

 from the large producing, but continually narrowed fields of the 

 old world. With a population now of forty millions, that will 

 probably be expanded to a round hundred millions before the 

 year 1900, with possessions enlarged from the original narrow 

 strip along the Atlantic coast, into a mighty empire, stretching 

 three thousand miles across the continent to the Pacific Ocean, 

 and upward from the Mexican gulf to the northern lakes and 

 the Arctic regions of Alaska, with nearly fifty thousand miles of 

 railroad that bring all sections of the Union into quicker com- 

 munion than existed between Boston and Washington when the 

 first agricultural society in Berkshire was established, with one 

 hundred and fifty thousand miles of telegraph enabling widely 

 separated States and people to interchange intelligence more 

 rapidly than could have been done thirty years ago between the 

 towns of a single county, what vistas of national greatness burst 



