AMERICAN INDUSTRY. 67 



The exclusive reliance of the farmer upon manual labor, 

 excludes from his employ that class of men, especially young 

 men, which finds intellectual occupation as necessary as bodily 

 exercise ; and this includes no small portion of the American 

 family. However much we may chant the praise of labor, it is 

 nevertheless true that continued and severe physical toil is 

 incompatible with mental culture or exertion. Can we be sur- 

 prised that young men should be attracted to those pursuits in 

 which boidily fatigue is accompanied by intellectual excite- 

 ment, rather than to that where mental action is extinguished 

 by physical exhaustion ? The substitution of mechanical labor 

 in the heavy business of farming, will not only attract the 

 attention of those who now fly from it, but it changes the char- 

 acter of the pursuit itself from that of drudgery to the dignity 

 of a science. There is satisfactory employment for the most 

 active mind in the analysis of soils, the study of the principles 

 which regulate the phenomena of the atmosphere, through the 

 operation of the barometer, the thermometer, the hygrometer 

 and rain gauge ; in tracing the laws of vegetable and animal 

 life, and in the innumerable pursuits which make farming, 

 when elevated to the dignity of an intellectual as well as labo- 

 rious pursuit, the most solacing and satisfactory of all human 

 employments. 



Nor need we limit the aid of mechanical powers to that point 

 we have attained. Other improvements will follow. A friend 

 in whose ability I have confidence, stated that he had in con- 

 templation a machine capable, with the aid of a single man, of 

 sowing, harrowing and rolling ten acres of wheat in a single 

 day. The steam plough at no distant day will usurp the 

 place of the draft power, connected with the plough since 

 the l)eginning of rural history. The substitution of liquid 

 fertilizers for the present cumbersome and weighty manures, 

 will perfect the economy commenced with the introduction of 

 drill husbandry, and portable farm railways make even the 

 heavy work of farming a pastime and pleasure. It is objected, 

 I am aware, that these implements are beyond the means of 

 small farmers. But the answer is that it is never necessary for 

 a man of limited means to purchase an implement of doubtful 

 utility. There are always other means of testing the value of 

 new assistants ; and in regard to the heavier and more expensive 



