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perity of our country. They wore thriving farmers, and with 

 the exception of a limited commerce, they held in their hands 

 all the resources of our country. They carried our country 

 through the revolutionary war, — " the embattled farmers," as 

 the poet calls them. Year after year they toiled on, clad in 

 their household manufactures, laboring on the soil with their 

 own hands, by prudence and economy constantly increasing 

 their own wealth and developing the wealth of the republic 

 which they had founded. They led lives of usefulness, and 

 left behind them on every hill-side and in every valley in our 

 State, the broad and thrifty farms which even now bear witness 

 to their sagacity in selecting land, and their skill in cultivating 

 it. They had neither agricultural school nor society, nor news- 

 paper to guide them ; and were they alive to-day, they might 

 well inquire why all tins intellectual effort is put forth to 

 accomplish what they accomplished simply by obedience to the 

 natural laws of earth and sky. 



Now, if we have what they had not, they had what we have 

 not. Their soil was as fresh and fertile as the vegetable 

 and mineral accumulations of centuries could make it. They 

 required but little manure. Their staple crops of corn, 

 potatoes, grass and small grain were abundant, in favorable 

 seasons. A record carefully kept in Essex County shows that 

 in the early part of this century, there were raised to the acre, 

 28 bushels of wheat, 117 bushels of corn, 52 bushels of barley, 

 518 bushels of common potatoes, 900 bushels of carrots, 1,034 

 bushels of mangel-wurzel, 688 bushels of swedes, 783 bush- 

 els of beets, 654 bushels of onions ; thirty tons of hay grew on 

 six acres, and the yearly average of forty acres was, for many 

 years, more than 120 tons. Their pastures were luxuriant ; 

 and the abundance of sweet grass enabled them to feed with 

 consideraljle profit, animals whose excessive carcasses rendered 

 a liberal supply of food imperatively necessary. Their wants 

 were few and simple, their labor was cheap, their markets were 

 seldom overstocked ; and they followed the advice of Dr. Put- 

 nam in our day, and resolved " to stay at home," because they 

 had no convenient and rapid means of getting away. They 

 had but little book-farming, and that little was of such a 

 description that it secured their contempt rather than their 



