93 



ADDRESS. ~° 



county of Worcester and that of Ayr, would by degrees • 

 be vastly reduced, and, unless I am much mistaken, 

 your farmers here would in the end discover that their 

 investments were safer, their interest larger, their farms 

 still more rapidly appreciating in value, and their 

 eventual means of making outside investments greater 

 than at present. How many fields there are, now grown 

 up with coarse herbage and affording only a short and 

 poor pasturage, insufficient very likely to meet the 

 actual taxes assessed upon them, which a hundred or 

 two dollars in drainage, for example, might render the 

 most productive part of the farm, returning thereafter 

 taxes, cost of labor, interest on value and expenditures, 

 and something beyond. How far short is a large part, 

 not of this county alone, but of the whole State and 

 country, of being in that condition which any practical 

 farmer will recognize as the best, either for permanent 

 grass or for a rotation of tillage crops — but which how 

 many farmers, who know well enough by what means 

 that condition is to be attained — whom I would not for 

 a moment think of attempting to instruct in any of 

 the secrets of their business — are contented not to reach, 

 dreading the outlay required, because the returns seem 

 distant, — preferring to send their money very possibly 

 u out West " at one or two per cent, a month, and pinch 

 the farm forever tighter and tighter because that money 

 don't get back from its Western tour at all. Such, 

 gentlemen, is the fact, alas ! of multitudes of invest- 

 ments outside the farm ; if the farmer understands his 

 business, should not his endeavor be, like that of the 

 merchant or the manufacturer, to go on investing 

 capital in it, until its machinery everywhere runs as 

 smoothly, and its working powers are as greatly per- 



