10. • 



we older men can remember tlie glowing accounts we' 

 read of the productiveness of the New York lands in 

 wheat and their richness in breadstuffs. Next we hear 

 of St. Louis flour ; then we read of Minnesota flour. But 

 the fact which most vividly portrays the rapid exhaus- 

 tion of land in this country is, that wheat from California 

 was brought in ships fifteen thousand miles, in 1868^ 

 around Cape Horn, carried by railroad and canal to t^e 

 Genesee Valley, and in the Rochester mills ground to 

 supply the wants of its inhabitants, sons of those fathers 

 who supplied all New England, within a generation, with 

 their surplus flour. 



In searching for a remedy for this exhaustion of the 

 soil, to find the means by which farming can become one- 

 of the profitable occupations, to bring back our boys tO' 

 the homestead and the cultivation of the land, — the 

 natural occupation of men, because men of all profes- 

 sions, men in trade, men in every pursuit of life, the 

 shipmaster on the sea, and the lawyer in the forum, 

 all are looking forward to that time in their old age 

 when, having accumulated a fortune more or less exten- 

 sive, they can come back to Mother Earth and finish life- 

 tilling the land at last ; — we will see that the remedy 

 cannot be found by any comparison we can make o-f the 

 different sections of our own country. For we see the 

 same causes producing the same effects, the same im- 

 poverishment of the soil, after a few years of skimming; 

 it, the same aggregations of land which cannot be tilled, 

 the same unwillingness in the sons to follow the business 

 of their fathers in tilling the earth, and everywhere even 



• 



greater want of productiveness than in New England. 

 Therefore it is that we must go to other sources of com- 



