52 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



This era has already commenced. The markets which lie at 

 our very doors, and furnish as safe and ready a sale for our 

 products as can be found on earth, have developed all around 

 our large cities, a system of agriculture, which is not easily sur- 

 passed in economy and appropriateness. The last quarter of a 

 century has proved that a judicious investment in systematic 

 and careful husbandry, with all the light which the science of 

 agriculture can bestow, has received a reasonable and often 

 higlily liberal reward. Farming under such circumstances has 

 proved itself to be profitable, and is, in consequence, becoming 

 more and more attractive. An increasing variety in the 

 demands of our markets, is constantly appealing to the ingenuity 

 of our population. And that energy which in the early 

 history of our country found its only opportunity in tilling the 

 earth, producing a simple and prudent system of agriculture 

 among us, has after long wandering in other spheres returned 

 once more to the land. 



Our fathers were good farmers. I can go with you to an 

 early settled section of New England and admire the monu 

 ments of industry and skill which they left behind them. They 

 had a remarkable genius for the selection of land. It was the 

 source of their entire subsistence. In the clearing, the savage 

 startled them at their ploughs. When the battles of freedom 

 were to be fought, it was the furrows in their fields which sent 

 forth their crop of armed men ; it was farms which were 

 deserted, not factories and mills. The chief trade of the times 

 consisted in the interchange of farm products, or in their 

 exchange for a scanty supply of imported articles of luxury and 

 necessity. I say they were good farmers, for they farmed in 

 accordance with the requirements of the times. They built 

 heavy stone walls, they cleared large fields, they understood all 

 the emergencies which might arise, they knew where to plant 

 the dollar, in order that it might " return to them after many 

 days." The houses and barns which they left behind them, 

 and which literally grew up out of the soil, indicate thrift, 

 prudence, and great skill in overcoming the many obstacles 

 which lay all around them. Let no man suppose that this race 

 of men is extinct. There is a space lying between the elabo- 

 rate cultivation of our thickly peopled districts^ and the still 

 smoking forests of our new settlements, in which agriculture is 



