AMERICAN INDUSTRY 65 



by our disturbed vision, has impressed upon the public mind a 

 fear that some of the great original interests of society are too 

 much neglected. 



The feverish return to field labor, suggested by the closely 

 proximate want of the last year or two, by the appearance in 

 our great cities of the Middle States of hunger assemblies and 

 bread rioters, by the reference, at our tables, to the probability 

 of sufficient supplies for ourselves, and the suppressed sigh for 

 the thousands whose tables would bear little or none of that 

 which supports life, does not satisfy us. The inquiry is repeated, 

 Wliere are the young American men ? What drives them from 

 the homestead or the farm to the hazardous pursuits of specu- 

 lation : — pursuits in which success is as a hundred to one ; 

 which shorten the period of individual existence, dwarf the 

 physical proportions of our race, and shock us with the heart- 

 lessness of their conventionalities ? 



There are several suggestions upon this point that claim 

 consideration. The most notable characteristic of the American 

 people is their intellectual activity. It is inherited from their 

 fathers. It is exhibited in every pursuit of life. It develops 

 itself in literature, in commerce, in politics, in mechanics, in 

 territorial expansion ; and those circles in which intellectual life 

 is most vivacious and vigorous, present the strongest claim to 

 public favor. Have agriculturists opened a sufficient field for 

 the exercise of this power ? If they have not, it is a failure in 

 the method rather than in the nature of their pursuit. 



In other classes of business a process is adhered to only so 

 long as it is superior to all others, and constant experiment 

 subjects to constant tests its comparative efficiency and perfec- 

 tion. Is not tradition, on the other hand, adhered to as against 

 experiment, in no inconsiderate part of the agricultural world ? 

 In other pursuits, the aid of machinery has been constantly 

 invoked. Agriculture has, until the present generation, offered 

 but slight, if any encouragement, to the proffered aid of 

 mechanical powers. The chief ideas represented in the com- 

 plex structure of modern agricultural machinery, have been 

 known as existent powers for centuries, and many of them as 

 instruments used in the days of Roman ground culture. The 

 American reaper, that has lately startled the people of France, 

 as a few years since it did England, with the perfection of its 

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