seventy-five thousand people. It has more than four 

 times tliat number now, — about 330,000 people. They 

 must be fed, and it needs only a glance to see what a 

 honayiza Essex County farming might have proved with 

 such a market at its door, but for the utter, unprecedented 

 and revolutionizing change in otlier conditions of the 

 problem. There is no class of persons in the county so 

 directly and so vitally interested in this growth and cen- 

 tralizing of numbers as is the Essex County farmer. 



It was the locomotive engine which made possible the 

 development of the great northwest, and it was the loco- 

 motive engine which built up eastern cities at the expense 

 of the surrounding towns, and the locomotive engine was 

 not hit upon until ten years after this Society was founded. 

 This contrivance, in conjunction with machinery superced- 

 ing hand-work in so many manufactures, has robbed the 

 country population of its natural increase, and hived our 

 people together like bees, in the great industrial centres, 

 — these are the factors in our migration problem which 

 have made us from a rural into a city people. How 

 thoroughly this change has followed will best appear again 

 from the figures. In 1820 the proportion of the popula- 

 tion of the County living in the three places which had 

 6,000 inhabitants and upwards, was just about one third, 

 and half of them were in Salem. In 1895 the proportion 

 of the people of the County living in places of 6,000 inhabi- 

 tants and upwards, is thirteen-seventeenths of the whole. 

 In other words, two people lived in the country then to one 

 in a large town, and now thirteen people live in a city or 

 large town to four in a town of less than (i,000 inhabitants. 

 Time would not serve me to ask how far the general 

 thrift and comfort have kept pace with population. Un- 

 doubtedly these have advanced, and undoubtedly the 

 Essex County farmer profits by it in full proportion with 

 the world at large. But how has this apparent corner 



