20 



the globe, the Mississippls and the Amazons, the oceans into 

 ■which they flow are lilted fiom their beds and plunged from 

 the precipices of the sky. Nature in all her works gives one 

 precept. " JJaste not, laant not, use, save and not destroy." 

 These are the laws of permanence and power. 



Where then among the forces of society shall we seek the 

 principle whose operation shall harmonize with nature's grand 

 economy, and be the basis of a system of agriculture that shall 

 be perpetual and self-sustaining in the elements of a fertile 

 soil ? The conscience of the individual is of too limited a 

 scope to be trusted to decide upon grounds of permanent well- 

 being the issue in which present gain is met by a possible or 

 prospective loss to unborn generations. This principle, if 

 found, will be found most effectually established in the econ- 

 omy of the national industry, and so established that the 

 present shall not be called to the difficult virtue of self-sacri- 

 fice, the resources of the future shall not be endangered, and 

 the very working of the farip shall lay the foundation for 

 still more abundant harvests. I find the hint of the principle 

 sought, in that rule of good farming which enjoins the con- 

 sumption upon the farm of the products of the farm, and the 

 selection for the market, not of the hay and turnips, but the, 

 mutton and the beef. This economy carried out upon a 

 national scale, would give us a distributed home consump- 

 tion of agricultural products at diffused and accessible cen- 

 tres of a diversified mechanical and manufacturing indus- 

 try, and of the commerce Avhich such industry creates. For 

 at these centres the fertilizing constituents of the harvest 

 accumulate. Rejected by the processes of consumption, still 

 as suitable for the crop as Avhen deposited by the last inunda- 

 tion, they become again available to all neighbojing f\irms, to 

 which they are as truly the raw material of an agricultural 

 product, as iron, cotton and wool to the machine-shop and the 

 mill. The spread of cities like Lawrence throughout the land, 

 with different industries, adapted to local capabilities, will give 

 to the agriculture of the nation the conditions of a self-sus- 



