8 



crop yon take or your. drafts are protested at once. All the condi- 

 tions of New England life as well as the physical condition of its 

 soil and climate, prevent the southern and -western methods of cul- 

 tivation. A New England farm would hardly be considered a 

 resj^ectable corn or wheat field in the west. Narrowed down then, 

 by the necessity of the case, to a few acres — having a soil that must 

 be carefully manured and tilled to joroduce a crop — ^living in a 

 chmate where winter reaches far into spring, and early fi'osts often 

 destroy the finest prospects of a harvest, having all these adverse 

 conditions to contend against, the New England farmer has been 

 compelled to w^ork more with hand and head than any other tiller 

 of the soil in our land. These hard conditions are the secret of 

 the increase of agricultural knowledge among us. The western 

 man wonders where our farmers are found — wonders how we can 

 live — says that New England would have been left to the bears and 

 Avolves, if the West had been known to the early settlers. But if 

 he is a man of intelligence, he knows that no where else in our 

 land is the science of agricultui'e so thorougly understood and 

 applied, as among the New England hiUs and valleys. Had we 

 been shut out fi'om the fertile "West, we should have known more 

 than we now do, and New England soil would have been richer and 

 more productive than it is to-da}-. , 



But Ave proudly point to the products that are noAV gathered in 

 every part of our State, from Plymouth to Berkshire, as proof of 

 Yankee skiU in wringing from a scanty soil the choicest fniits and 

 golden corn. Luxuriant crojDS and the finest of herds and flocks 

 are here on exhibition. And if we have not the abundance of our 

 Western brothers, we glory in our crops as the product of thought 

 and labor. 



The time is coming when the deep soils of the West and South 

 will have yielded their superabundant riches, and, like New Eng- 

 land, their soil yvlW demand the fostering care of agricultiu'al 

 science. The time is near at hand, when those broad plantations, 

 once growing poorer under the impoverishing curse of sla^-ery, and 

 the rich praiiie, starved by years of robbery, will be the homes of 

 busy millions, a crowded population cutting them into small farms, 

 and re]5roducing in every part of the National domain something 

 of the New^ England tj-pe of life. This is inevitable under those 

 wise laws that, forbidding] the entailment of land, subjects it to the 

 t'hance of sale and division at least once in every generation. 



It is not then for New England alone, it is for this great coimtiy 



