Address 



have been greatly diminished both in number and severity. The quiet en- 

 joyment of domestic life is now possible, even upon large farms, since the 

 rude hired men of the olden time are mostly replaced by the sleek horses 

 who perform their work. The milk train, the cheese factory, the machines 

 for washing and wringing, churning, and sweeping, sewing and knitting, 

 and a thousand other improvements lighten their responsibilities, lessen their 

 labors, and shorten their hours of toil. 



While it is thus encouraging to review the history of our agriculture, 

 it is evident that much remains to be accomplished before our system of 

 farming as actually practiced will derive the benefit it ought from the 

 best knowledge of the present day, and the farmers as a class have that 

 degree of intelligence and skill which is most desirable. 



We are assured on good authority that the soil of the United States has 

 been devastated and impoverished by our past agricultural operations to 

 the extent of more than $1,000,000,000, and that the loss from poor 

 cultivation of crops — from what Henry Ward Beecher styles the horizontal, 

 iu distinction from the vertical, method of farming — in the year 1809 was 

 not less than $200,000,000. It is also undoubtedly true that the 

 actual waste of fertilizers from want of proper shelter and care amounted 

 in the aggregate to many millions of dollars. Even in Massachusetts there 

 are probably 75,000 barns to-day without cellars or other suitable means 

 for saving the more valuable portion of animal excrement. 



It may be safely asserted that money wisely applied lo the advancement 

 of agriculture is most profitably invested. When Henry Colman was oc- 

 cupied, from 1836 to 1840, as commissioner in making an agricultural sur- 

 vey of this state, there were many even among the farmers who regarded 

 his work as of little, if any, value, and it was finally suspended before its com- 

 pletion for want of an appropriation from the legislature. In his final re- 

 port he says, that the total expense to the people had been about one cent 

 for each inhabitant, and that one of the.best informed men in the state had 

 expressed the opinion that it had already been worth thirty times its cost 

 in its beneficial effects upon the agriculture of the Commonwealth. If he 

 had been instrumental in reclaiming an average of three acres of peat bog 

 in each town, as he supposed he had. he shows that he had thus created 

 property worth at least $150,000 and yielding an income of $20,000 per an- 

 num. If he had led to the making each year in every town an average 

 of 200 loads of compost worth one dollar a load more than it cost, he de- 

 monstrates that he had thus developed an annual income of $00,000. 



The money expended was therefore obviously returned many times over 

 • luring the progress of the survey, and will be every year while agriculture 



