388 AGRICULTURE. 



The markets of this country will not only be supplied with fruit in 

 great abundance and excellence, but thousands of orchards will be 

 cultivated solely for foreign consumption. 



The system of railroads and cheap transportation already begins 

 to supply the seaboard cities with some of the fair and beautiful 

 fruits of the fertile west. When the orchards of Massachusetts fail, 

 the orchards of western New- York will supply the Boston market 

 with apples ; and thus, wherever the finest transportable products 

 of the soil are in demand, there they will find their way. 



There are, however, many of the finer and more perishable pro- 

 ducts of the garden and orchard which will not bear a long journey. 

 These, it should be the peculiar business of the cultivator of the older 

 and less fertile soil in the seaboard States to grow. He may not, 

 as an agriculturist, be able to compete with the fertile soils of the 

 west ; but he may still do so as a horticulturist, by devoting his at- 

 tention and his land to orchards and gardens. If it is too difficult 

 and expensive to renovate an old soil that is worn out, or bring up 

 a new one naturally poor, for farm crops, in the teeth of western 

 grain prices, he may well afford to do so for the larger profit derived 

 from orchard and garden culture, where those products are raised 

 for which a market must be found without long transportation. He 

 who will do this most successfully must not waste his time, labor, 

 and capital, by working in the dark. He must learn gardening and 

 orcharding as a practical art, and a science. He must collect the 

 lost elements of the soil from the animal and mineral kingdoms, and 

 bring them back again to their starting point. He must seek out 

 the food of plants in towns and villages, where it is wasted and 

 thrown away. He must plant and prune so as to aid and direct 

 nature, that neither time nor space are idly squandered. 



Certainly, we have just pride and pleasure in looking upon the 

 great agricultural class of America. Landholders and proprietors 

 of the soil, as they are, governing themselves, and developing the 

 resources of a great nation how different is their position from that 

 of the farmers of England, hundreds of thousands of men, work- 

 ing, generation after generation, upon lands leased by a small privi- 

 leged body, which alone owns and entails the soil ; or even from 

 that of France, where there are millions of proprietors, but proprie- 



