13 



Now how changed ! Every State, every county, every town, al 

 most every farm has its railroad communication. We have, as has been 

 said, "rendered the railway a domestic institution, so that the steam car 

 visits nearly every hamlet and every considerable town. The music of its 

 whistle no longer frightens the farmer's horse, nor docs the proximity of the 

 thundering locomotive, raging and sighing under its weighty burden, and 

 with the pressure of its fiery spirit, disturb the equanimity of the axious 

 matron, careful for the safety of her child." Every hill pasture, the crops 

 of every valley are brought within a few hours of market, The cattle 

 which to-day grazed upon the rich pastures of the West, before the set of 

 to-morrow's sun are far on their way to feed the teeming population of 

 New York and the eastern cities. The transit of a thousand miles to-day 

 is attended with less labor and annoyance, than the farmer of half a century 

 ago underwent in carrying his grain to market over fifty miles of rough 

 and muddy road. 



While these great changes have been going on in the improvement of 

 agriculture, the development of its resources, and the establishment of all 

 means for internal trade, the relations of the agriculture of the different 

 sections of our country, one to another, have also changed, In 1840, 

 more than two-thirds of the crop of Indian corn was raised in the slave- 

 holding States ; and but a very small portion of it was exported The 

 cotton-growing States at that time depended very much upon their own 

 resources for feeding their people, supplying themselves with manufactured 

 goods and luxuries from the North and from foreign countries. In the 

 lapse of twenty years all this had changed. When the war broke out the 

 cotton-growing States supplied themselves with meats, and breadstuffs, hay, 

 apples, potatoes, horses and mules from the West. From the eastern 

 States they purchased most of their manufactured goods, their bales, rope 

 and bagging, their engines, sugar mills, and cotton-gins, much of their ma- 

 terial for house-building, and mechanics to erect them, their paper, their 

 books, their teachers, their shipping, their capital. In return the west 

 and east consumed their cotton, sugar, and rice. An immense domestic 

 trade had sprung up, of such a character as to furnish a market for the 

 special products of each section, whether drawn from the soil or created by 

 the ingenuity of the people. Since the breaking out of the war, this re- 

 lation has changed, but not to such an extent that the return of peace will 

 not re-establish the old order of things. I anticipate an increase of agri- 

 cultural enterprise now that the Federal government has secured its legi- 

 timate control on this continent, such as has seldom been witnessed — even 



