15 



centered round a coal pit, which could reach it with hand- 

 barrows or supply itself with tip-carts would never create a 

 demand that would sink a shaft below the surface, or, in 

 other words, coal, where it is produced, is a drug in the 

 market, and the price we pay for coal is made up main- 

 ly of the cost of distribution. 



Now apply this, if you will, to Essex County farming. 

 Ever}^ day my car-ride takes me through many acres of 

 splendid cabbages and squashes, — inestimable esculents, in 

 the words of Choate, but bulky crops to handle. These 

 are destined to be sold at a very moderate figure in the 

 Boston market. I never look at them without reflecting how 

 unreasonable a fraction of the price per pound at w^hicli the 

 buyer gets them is made up of the inordinate cost of prima- 

 tive modes of transportation. If they could reach Boston 

 by some cheaper Avay, the buyer would get them cheaper, — 

 the farmer would make a better profit, — and his sales 

 would steadily grow greater. When I listen at midnight 

 to the rumble of that endless caravan of market-wagons 

 which has been making its way through Salem for a 

 century since Essex Bridge was opened, — -a long, unbroken 

 commissary-train rolling at day-break into Boston with the 

 day's supply of hay and market-gardening, — I cannot resist 

 the obvious reflection that close along-side the highway so 

 laboriously traversed is an electric railway ti-ack, utterly 

 unused from midnight until day-break, which is, or would 

 seem to be, the natural medium for collecting and deliver- 

 ing the bulky freight requiring night transportation. If 

 this is true of the Boston supply it is true also of the local 

 markets of tlie county. These will develop more and more 

 as the farmer specializes his crops, and concentrates his 

 forces, and raises what will sell, and buys all else, and forr 

 gets all that delightful variety of farm-production, which 

 went out with quilting bees, and home spinning and weav- 

 ing, and peat fuel, and the grist mill. He must at hii* 



