8 



ADDRESS. 



It is the result of increasing experience in the capa- 

 bilities of a country, as it grows older, and the great 

 principle of " division of labor " becomes more generally 

 recognized amidst a denser population, to resolve the 

 problem of the comparative purposes to which the dif- 

 ferent parts are best adapted. Water does not more 

 surely tend to its own level, than do the various 

 branches of Agriculture seek an equilibrium, provided 

 there are cheap and untrammeled channels of inter- 

 communication and transport, as there are among us. 

 In this point of view, the history of the farming of any 

 one district or of the country as a whole, might be 

 rendered most instructive, if so written that we could 

 trace in it the various steps by which the present 

 equipoise, so to speak, has been arrived at, and ascer- 

 tain more clearly what are the essential, and what are 

 merely incidental, conditions of that equipoise, where 

 we are to draw the line between a well advised adhe- 

 rance to established systems, as being the offspring of 

 long practice founded upon immutable laws, on the one 

 hand, and a senseless clinging to the past on the other, 

 simply because it is the past. At the present time 

 wheat is brought from the valley of the Mississippi to 

 feed the farmers of Massachusetts, and hams from Cin- 

 cinnati to supply the breakfast tables of Boston and 

 Worcester. Under the competition of our great west- 

 ern country, with its exuberant and almost costless 

 production, English farmers, too, are discussing the 

 propriety of reducing their extent of grain land, modi- 

 fying their system of cultivation, and grazing still 

 larger quantities of stock, since we have not yet discov- 

 ered any way of sending them beeves and wethers 

 fattened for the butcher. Great Britain also furnishes 



