AMERICAN INDUSTRY. 59 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS RELATIONS TO 

 AMERICAN INDUSTRY. 



From an Address to the Hampshire Agricultural Society, Oct. 14, 1858. 



BY NATHANIEL P. BANKS. 



There are few States that can keep pace with the American 

 people in the rapid increase of product and population. Their 

 numerical increase is unexampled, and their industrial product 

 is even more surprising than their increase in numbers. Every 

 field of human enterprise and labor has been explored and 

 exhausted, and when the last possible success, by known expe- 

 dients, has been attained, inventive genius has enlarged the 

 field of action, furnished new subjects and new objects, and 

 added to the general result by substituting the limitless labor 

 of machinery for that of persons. It is to this activity of mind 

 and body, the unceasing transformation of material, and the 

 necessary exchange of product and increased remuneration, 

 that we are to look as the sources of national wealth and the 

 prosperity of our people. 



As we increase our capacity for labor, we extend the fields 

 of enterprise ; — stretch away from ocean to ocean, felling 

 forests, building cities, erecting states, forming constitutions, 

 constructing railways, tunneling mountains, excavating seas, 

 creating new literatures and striking out new systems of educa- 

 tion. As we glide along in this strange career, we attach 

 foreign states to us by reciprocal treaties, and connect conti- 

 nents by submarine telegraphs. Our ambition is to possess the 

 territory that immediately joins us, and to be right in the 

 neighborhood of those that own the rest of the world, ready to 

 buy or to sell at the slightest intimation that a reasonable chance 

 for trade exists. We religiously comply with the scriptural 

 injunction to replenish the earth, and not only increase our own 

 numbers, but are not greatly alarmed by threatened depopu- 



