8 ADDRESS. 



'^ that the West is the only spot for farming," and tliis idea, Utopian 

 as it is, is doing us more harm than everything else. My farming 

 interlocutor says I should like to stop here. I lo^e a New England 

 home, dislike to leave parents and others to whom I am fondly at- 

 tached, the graves of dear friends, the old church and school house, 

 but I must go where I can get better crops, 40 bushels of wheat or 

 80 bushels of corn to the acre. I once chanced to hear in a Fitch- 

 burg car a western Illinois farmer explaining to a candidate for 

 emigration the astounding diiference of the crops in the two sec- 

 tions. The western prairie, for instance, grew eighty bushels of 

 corn to the acre, against forty here in Massachusetts, which was 

 not lit for a farmer, and, to use his words, the sooner he pulled up 

 stakes the better. Seeing that the Illinoisian had it his own way, 

 and that my young friend was drinking it all up as law and gospel, 

 I ventured to ask the former somewliat as follows : What do you 

 get a bushel for your corn in Illinois, average price ? Not 

 obliged to sell it. Well, if you do sell it ? Twenty-five cents at de- 

 pot. Sometimes you cart it in the mud ? Ye-e-s. You give to us 

 forty ? Not always. It is notorious that our river vallies grow 

 as much corn to the acre as you claim for the prairies — eighty 

 bushels. Well, I give it up and allow you an average of forty 

 bushels. 



Corn raised here, I mean the good old yellow corn of Massa- 

 chusetts, is worth one dollar per bushel, cash, one year with an- 

 other. It is worth it to-day, Mr. President, if I am right ; if I am 

 wrong, let Mr. Gushing or Mr. Carleton, or some other miller cor- 

 rect me, who is in the hearing of my voice. I had now, as you per- 

 ceive, got $40 per acre against his $20, to say nothing of the extra 

 labor of harvesting, with the privilege of getting the shakes to 

 boot. It is easily cured with quinine, never entirely. I. hope 

 sometime for leisure to discuss more fully a market at your doors, 

 or from 1 to 2000 miles off. I mean with the privileges and com- 

 forts of life taken into consideration; not cabins, against our 

 dwelling houses, not a prairie sea, with hardly a tree or a stone for 

 fencing, against our churches, school houses and stone walls ; not 

 mud and lime water, against our pure and limpid springs and 

 fountains, gushing from a tliousand hills. 



With nothing but tlie kindest feeliugs toward the great West, 

 a Massachusetts farmer, in emigrating there, in this short life sac- 

 rifices too much altogether — the home he loves — the exquisite 

 feeling that thrills every noble heart of sleeping with his fathers. 

 The reflection that, comparatively, the tears of strangers only can 



