No. 4.] EASTERN AND WESTERN FARMING. 175 



price of the farms, and requiring less annual outlay and 

 future cost of improvements than western farms. 



The vahie of our diversified markets, where individual 

 sales are made at special rates for extra fine butter, fresh 

 eggs, poultrj^, fruits and a line of the more refined products 

 of agriculture, is great. We do not sufier from the dispirit- 

 ing influence of distant markets, and are aided by the reflex 

 action of diversified industries on the ambition and morale 

 of farming. Farming is not likely to have in it, when 

 isolated from other industries, quite that snap that it would 

 have when exhilarated by an example of successes and 

 culture of high order on every hand. It must be confessed 

 that this principle seems to have little application in this 

 section, for the agriculture of the west has been more 

 spirited than that of the east. This I have explained in the 

 fact that a race of men of moderate means have sought in the 

 west homes and fortunes upon soils where nature has done 

 much for them, and which they were bound to take advan- 

 tage of in building up the essentials of life around them, 

 New England being dispirited by abnormal profits and 

 opportunities afforded in the west and in eastern cities, both 

 for its young men and its money. 



That era and all that characterized it are dead forever. 

 Overaction has settled the fertile lands of the country, until 

 in remote areas they are higher priced than near our great 

 markets. Capital has hunted for and operated the visible 

 opportunities for sudden wealth that a new continent affords 

 and that new discoveries in science opened up to us in pro- 

 fuse array. And now the reaction is apparently setting in, 

 fortunately before rural New England has passed the point 

 where it fails to retain enough of recuperative strength in 

 men and money. Men and capital are beginning to see that 

 our old farms aflford a reasonable opportunity for each, and 

 I predict that New England agriculture is about to enter 

 upon the most glorious era of its history. The cry of aban- 

 doned farms is no longer to advertise the apparent paralysis 

 of New Emrland farmino;. 



The last census has shown that rural New England calls no 

 louder for sympathy than the rural south and the rural west. 

 We notice that in such States as Alabama and Virginia in 



