13 



But, after all, it is of very little consequence to my present 

 purpose, whether I am accurately exact as to my details. At 

 all events, you are convinced that my farmer must be a very 

 shrewd and energetic and skilful man, and you must be sat- 

 isfied that he will require all his capacity, industry and skill 

 to manage his business successfully. What with his corn to 

 buy in Illinois ; his grain in Iowa ; his hay in Maine ; his 

 cows in New Hampshire and Vermont ; and his straw and 

 the hundred other supplies in constant use to be bought each 

 in the best market, his mercantile faculty must be good, and 

 with the supervision of his stock and business, he will find 

 the longest day too short for his labors. 



And so you see, my friends, the old brown house and the 

 poetic barn, the sunny pasture and the shady brook, haying 

 and harvest, all have disappeared, swallowed up by the insati- 

 able and relentless maw of progress. And as the whirling 

 spinning-wheel of the cottage has been turned into the lum- 

 bering mule of the factory, so the picturesque farm of im- 

 memorial literature and art is transformed into a milk-mill. 



And now, I need hardly remind you, that I intend this crude 

 and hasty sketch merely as a suggestion. Is the narrow view 

 I have taken capable of a wider range .-' Is it not desirable 

 to call to our aid the close calculation of small economies and 

 exact application of the most approved means to ends which 

 characterize the plans of successful manufacturers .-* Would 

 it not pay us here near Boston to abandon the old, wide- 

 spread system of half cultivating a teijitory and turn to the 

 careful high tillage of a field .-' 



I am not ignorant that many of our keen Yankee farmers 

 have long ago found this out. They have almost instinctive- 

 ly turned to take the only way out of the dilemma into which 

 all general farming in New England was thrown, when 

 millions of acres of such land, as many of you never dreamed 

 of, were thrown open to the plough at the West, and moved, 

 as it were, within competing distance by the railroads. It is 

 a matter of common fame, that four hundred thousand acres 

 of the improved land, in farms in our State, twenty-five years 



