20 



The LANCASTER PARMEf^. 



i Pebfoafy, 



moved in 1870 equalled 150,000,000 tons, 

 now probably much greater, while in 

 1851 it did not exceed 5,000,000 tons. The 

 wheat grown within live hundred miles of tide 

 water is mostly consumed on the spot; the 

 wheat for export comes from the west. The 

 volume of wheat of to-day is more than tliree- 

 fold greater than thirty years ago, but the 

 increa.se of that of it grown beyond the Mis- 

 sissippi is gieaterthan the entire crop of 1849, 

 and live per cent, only was tiien produced 

 west of the father of waters. 



How many states and clustering towns and 

 monuments of fame and .scenes of gloriouS 

 deeds have rewarded the industry of our 

 people in the last lifty years. There is New 

 York with a population of ;i million of human 

 beings; what an amount of produce it takes 

 daily to feed this population, including its 

 dogs and cats and horses ! 



Hunger is a god to whom all men render 

 homage; life is a ,strifc for bread. The de- 

 mand for food is ccmstant and unremitting ; 

 but the agricultural population is ever equal 

 to the emergency; they dig and delve in 

 mother earth, spread to the west, and in- 

 crease the acreage of production to meet the 

 demand of tlie great metropolis. To such an 

 extent have the cities increased their popula- 

 tion, that the rural districts needed greater 

 facilities to move the produce from the pro- 

 ducer to the consummer; hence the railroad 

 and the steamer lend a helping hand to all 

 interested. To the farmer to get his products 

 to a distant market, but for the railroad and 

 steamship, the western crops would not be 

 raised, because the old modes of conveyance 

 by wagon and sailing vessels could not have 

 transported one-tenth of the quantity of the 

 breadstuffs needed by England, France and 

 other countries. 



The wonderful improvement in the means 

 of travel and the transportation of goods in 

 the last one hundred years is truly marvelous. 

 When Gov. Dinwiddle sent Washington, in 

 1753, with a message to the French com- 

 mandant at the fort on the Ohio, it took hi m 

 going ahd returning, although he made it as 

 quick as possible, more than one month. 

 When California was opened to the first set- 

 tlers from the Eastern States, they took pas- 

 sage in whale ships and merchanlmen whose 

 average passage was six mouths; steamers to 

 the Isthmus brought the journey to one month, 

 and now the railroad across the continent has 

 diminished it to six or eight days. What a 

 time and i)atience the overland emigrants 

 uuist have endured with their immense ox 

 teams, struggling along to reach the land of 

 gold. It is a matter of history, although 

 California in some years produces large 

 amounts of produce, "and that Gen. Sutter 

 cultivated heavy crops of wheat when .still 

 under the Spanish flag and traded it oil with 

 Alaska for iron, that tlie first gold hunter who 

 came there from the East had to pay enormous 

 prices for the necessaries of life ; and a New 

 Vork paper in 1855 had the following, seven 

 years after the gold fever had so completely 

 ab.sorbed attention all over the world: "The 

 ship Adelaide arrived at the port of New 

 York, on tlie 14th of (October, 1855, from San 

 Francisco, bringing a cargo of California 

 wheat, barley, &e., which paid a profit to the 

 shipper of nearly fifty per cent clear of ex- 

 penses, the wheal selling at an average of 

 about $2.00 per bushel. The same vessel 

 returned to the same port from which the 

 wheat was brought with 1,500 barrels of 

 flour. Some would think that 19,000 miles 

 was a long way to come to mill !" 



The projectjentertained by the Ptolomies, 

 of cutting a ship canal across the Isthmus of 

 Suez, was thought impossible by many 

 until the present century. The distance is not 

 great, but the fact is that tine ground consists 

 almost wholly of movable parched .sand. 

 But notwithstanding tliese almost insuperable 

 difficulties the Suez canal lias been constructed 

 at a cost of ninety-five millions of dollars, 

 twenty-three millions more than the Eric 

 canal of New York State. 

 This valuable impvovement is highly bene- 



ficial to the commerce of the world, and is an ' 

 indicati(m of the value of the pi'oposed ship | 

 canal across the Istlimus of Darien. Our 

 minister to China in 1872 reported the United 

 States trade to tliat country at 37 per cent, of 

 the vv'hole foreign trade of China. In that i 

 year tea was brought from China to Boston ! 

 via the Suez Canal at a cost of 4 cents per 

 pound; via steamship to California and thence 

 by railroad, at 7 cents per pound. Here is an 

 exemplification of the great benefit to all 

 branches of industry, and to all classes of 

 jieople in shortening distances iind expenses 

 in the transportation of goods. In 1822 flour 

 sold in Western Peinisylvauia at one dollar 

 and twenty-five cents per barrel, and wheat 

 in Ohio at twenty cents a bushel. There 

 were then no facilities to distant markets, 

 canals were few and railroads unknown, the 

 pack-saddle, the lumbering stage coach and 

 Conestoga teams carried the mails, passengers 

 and freight. Pittsburg was a small town, 

 and even as late as 1848 before the construc- 

 tiouofthe Pennsylvania railroad across the 

 Allegheny Mountain, avoiding the inclined 

 planes, it took eight days to make the trip 

 from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, and cost from 

 00 to 100 cents per hundred freight on mer- 

 chandise going west. Before the construction 

 of the Columbia railroad, or fifty years ago it 

 cost seventy-five cents to carry a barrel oftlour 

 from Lancaster to Philadelphia, now it is 

 transported on the railway for less than one- 

 third that amount. 



Errors of Great Men in Respect to Agriculture. 

 Lewis Cass, of Michigan, in an elaborate 

 address that contained much valuable infor- 

 mation on agriculture, believed in the absurd 

 notion that wheat taken from Egyptian 

 mummies that had remained dormant for two 

 thousand, years still had vitality enough to 

 germinate. A year ago Gen. B. F. Butler de- 

 livered an address at the international Dairy 

 Fair in New York which dealt heavy blows at 

 the shortcomings, as he represented it, of our 

 farmers. His comparison between American 

 and French agriculture in a statistical point of 

 view, preponderated vastly in favor of France, 

 but his statistics were not very freslr, as they 

 extended back to 1800 and 1868, and he put 

 the crop of wheat, oats barley and buckwheat 

 of France at 657,000,000 bushels against our 

 wheat, oats, barley and buckwheat 434,000,- 

 000. But never a word had this eloquent 

 champion of French agriculture to say of our 

 immense crop of over a billion of bushels of 

 Indian corn we produce, nor a word about 

 our great crops of hay, tobacco and cotton. 

 Why, our annual crop of corn alone overpeers 

 the cereal crops of France. 



The population in France has remained 

 nearly stationary for many years, and in 1860 

 exceeded the population of the United 

 States. The area of France exceeds the area of 

 New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana 

 combined. Much of the soil in France is very 

 Iiroductive, Paris is one of the finest cities in 

 the world. But there are in France 7,000,000 

 landed proprietors, most of whom are too 

 poor to ever taste of meat, and live mostly on 

 coarse bread and vegetables. The land fit for 

 tillage is cut up in parcels of a few acres, and 

 occupied and cultivated liy the owners, who 

 are mostly miserably poor, overloaded witli 

 debt and strongly attached to routine prac- 

 tices. Although the small proprietors are 

 industrious and economical, they have not 

 the means with which to buy improved ma- 

 chinery. It is customary to associate wealth 

 .and respectability with the possession of 

 landed property, and we are apt to conclude 

 that a country where tibout every second 

 person you meet is the proprietor of land 

 must be in a prosperous condition. But the 

 very reverse is the fact. In some districts 

 the plows in use are said to be the same as 

 tliose described by Virgil; and Wendell 

 I'hillips says in many parts of France and 

 Italy the plow is unknown. It does not 

 follow as a necessary sequence tliat because 

 France exports large quantities of agricultural 

 products, that her farming system is the best, 

 or that her working people are in comforta- 



ble circumstanced. The reverse is the fact, 

 and Ireland and India are not the only coun- 

 tries in which the most abiect poverty and 

 wretchedness on the part of the inhabitants 

 are found combined with great fertility of 

 soil and a large exportation of food. 



The small farm business which Butler so 

 much extolled in France, can never succeed 

 in a country that lias such tin abundance of 

 good unoccupied land as the United States. 



Near large towns the small farm business 

 liays well enough the milk dealer and truck 

 raiser. In the interior the farms of a 10() 

 acres or more pay best, because the success- 

 ful fanner needs implements, horses, cattle 

 and help to cultivate the land, which the 

 occupier of a few acres cannot use on his lot, 

 and he is therefore the slave of the spade and 

 the hoe. 



In England the great evil prevails that the 

 land is owned by the aristocracy and that 

 the tenants are subjected to such hard bargains 

 or heavy rents that they are mere slaves to 

 the huidlords. But even in Great Britain 

 things have changed, sometimes one way 

 and at other times another. In the twelfth 

 century the feudal system, during Ste- 

 phen's reign, presented deplorable evils. 

 "The nobles burnt all the towns. Thou 

 mightest go a whole day's journey and not 

 find a man sitting in a town, nor an acre of 

 land tilled. Wretched men starved of hun- 

 ger; to till the ground was to plough the sand 

 of the sea." Again, during two hundred 

 years from 1620 to 1820 the land was largely 

 owned and occupied by the men called 

 yeomen, and never before nor since were the 

 fiirmers as a cltiss in England more respected. 



But to-day the farmer, the actual farmer 

 in England and eveiywhere in the old world 

 has a hard situation to combat with. 



In 1870 France produced 102,454,038 

 bushels of wheat, whilst the United States 

 produced in 1870 425,000,000. 



Butler says we are too much given to mag- 

 nify our greatness, as if it were not sufficient 

 of itself. Indeed we have great reason to be 

 proud of our agriculture in furnishing an 

 abundance for home consumption and a large 

 surplus annually for exportation. He further 

 says everywhere all over America there is the 

 same spectacle of large farms unproductive 

 and unprofitable. Now this is true of the 

 very large farms in the West, but not true of 

 the 100 acre farms, for no where in the world 

 do you find more retil prosperity tuncing the 

 occupiers of the land than among the rural 

 population of the United States wlio cultivate 

 their own farms. 



In India, China, Japan, and generally in 

 Europe, the population is dense, and the peo- 

 ple, out of necessity are thrifty, industrious 

 ami economical. But would he either in 

 France or in the East have found anything 

 like the same comforts and conveniences that 

 prevail in the United States among the 

 farmers. Certiiiiily not. It is a remarkable 

 fact that nearly all the great ;ind valuable 

 inventions of modern times in agriculture, 

 and manufactures, have been brought into 

 use finly after every artifice of the people had 

 failed to ignore them. The absurd notion 

 prevailed that tliey diminish labor and take 

 away the means of working men making a liv- 

 ing;' that times were better for till classes than 

 ;it the present day, notwithstanding all 

 the improvements made in agriculture, 

 manufactures, commerce, mining, education 

 and government, and there are still 

 many who talk of the good old times, of the 

 old-f^ashioncd ways of our immediate progen- 

 itors. Respect for those to whom we owe our 

 existence is praiseworthy in a nation, as well 

 as in an individual. But would we wish to go 

 back to the spinning wheel, Hax brake, the 

 grass scythe, grain cradle, spade and harrow, 

 the slow stage, &c., when we have the cotton 

 and woolen mills, the reapers and mowers, the 

 plow, harrow and cultivator, the locomotive 

 and steamboat ? They throw in the back 

 ground the good old times, the better way, as 

 the son did the sire in the play: 



