10 Address. 



amised, hardened out of all rural virtues, and agree with Charles Lamb 

 who said he would have sinned to get out of the Garden of Paradise; or 

 are like Mr. Snagsby in Dickens' " Bleak House/' who got such a flavor of 

 the country out of telling his two apprentices how he had heard say that a 

 brook " as clear as chrys-t-ial " once ran right down the middle of Hol- 

 born leading slap away into the meadows — that he never icanted to go 

 there! Another serious mischief to the cause of agriculture, and true 

 national prosperity, is the hasty mode of culture practiced in the great 

 West. Our emigrants arc the same souls in new bodies, that, when landed 

 by Columbus, Pizarro, and other great discoverers on our shores, neglected 

 the fertile lands, the fruits, the employment within reach by moderately 

 skilled laborers, and clamored for gold. The present pioneers arc but 

 skimming the surface, and the Yankee farmer is discouraged occasionally, 

 and says: "I cannot compete with those men who plow up a black prairie 

 that costs them a dollar and a quarter an acre, avid harvest a splendid crop 

 with Fuch tools that one man can do the work of six." But remember 

 that "when the Western surface is first invaded, the settler finds a store of 

 the most delicate and precious plant food— potash left there by annual 

 burning; phosphoric acid from ages of antecedent animal life, and the del- 

 icate but e van vescent humus and ammonia from the decay of organic forms." 

 The generous soil is taxed yeir after year, yielding her fatness without any 

 return being made, and what follows is seen in the rapid decline of pro- 

 duction in all the wheat growing states from New York to the Pacific. 



This temporary farming, if not redeemed by more skillful culture, will 

 soon turn the fertile plains of the great valley into arid deserts, and be as 

 destructful to the great interests of humanity, as was the conversion of the 

 fruitful soil of Spain into grazing lands for sheep; and desolate tracts, like 

 those which still present in that country a terrible testimony to the world 

 against the suicidal policy of Phillip, 2d, and his successors, will betray to 

 tut arc generations a monstrous mismanagement and habitual contempt for 

 all sound principles of agriculture on the part of a people who will not be 

 excused on the ground of ignorance, nor pardoned because our present 

 greed swallows up a!I righteous considerations for the future. 



Another evil arising from this rapid exhaustion of the sources of pro- 

 duction in the East and the Middle States, is tic- extension of the line of 

 cultivation so far westward of the great depots of produce, that the ex- 

 pense attending the transit of grain for foreign markets inland will absorb 

 the profits, it being one of the indispensible conditions of commerce, of 



