20 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



that others, like the Asiatics, reach a condition of barbaric 

 splendor, and then stop. We cannot discuss the point, but 

 the Aryan, — a larger term for what we generally style 

 the white race, — the Aryan race does progress. This race 

 developed the civilizations of India and of Persia, of Greece 

 and Rome, of Germany and France, of England and the 

 United States. Whatever is most valuable among the posses- 

 sions of mankind to-day, is the product of their active brains 

 and industrious hands. From the remote past to the living 

 present they have been toiling and striving, waging a cease- 

 less war against nature and circumstances, — 



" Ever reaping something new, 

 That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do." 



The struggle has been long, but what is strange, the Aryan 

 race has gone forward more rapidly in the last hundred years 

 than in all the past centuries of its history. Mr. Gladstone 

 said, not long ago, that England had amassed more wealth in 

 this century than in all the previous eighteen hundred years of 

 the Christian era. Our own government has been founded, and 

 our wealth developed, in the same period. Consider for a mo- 

 ment what this implies. Call to mind the number and extent 

 of our canals ; our steamboats, which have come into existence 

 and have developed all their value, speed and beauty in one 

 hundred years ; our railroads, telegraphs, mills, factories, 

 furnaces, machines, gas, chemicals, the products of one hun- 

 dred years. The mind staggers under the magnitude of our 

 achievements. To use a favorite phrase, we cannot "realize 

 it" at a glance. The American boy looks out upon the world 

 and feels that it always was as he beholds it. His aged 

 grandfather takes his seat in a palace car and forgets that his 

 birth was. coeval with the steam-engine. 



Mr. Hittell, a very valuable writer, recently gave some 

 curious statistics relating to the world's progress in the last 

 hundred years. In the middle of the last century a turnpike 

 covered with gravel or broken stone was a rarity, even in the 

 neighborhoods of the great capitals of Europe. Travellers 

 then usually went on horseback. Not a hundred years have 

 elapsed since the owners of riding-horses petitioned the 

 English parliament to forbid the establishment of a stage- 



