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NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



May 



For the New England Fanner, 

 WOOL GROWING. 



It is a fault of New England that she runs of- 

 tener to extremes than other countries possessing 

 less enterprise and genius, and with less moral 

 force. This is more clearly felt now than at any 

 other period. New England has been the nurse- 

 ry of American enterprise and prosperity. She 

 has educated the farmers, the mechanics, the mer- 

 chants and professional men for the whole coun- 

 try, and in the future will feel the gx-eat draft of 

 the whole country upon her energies, now that 

 those energies are so diffused throughout a land 

 so prolific as the West, where her sons and daugh- 

 ters have settled and built up rival institutions of 

 agriculture, commerce and art. When New Eng- 

 land owned the commerce of the country, and the 

 manufactures were held in the hollow of her hands, 

 and the West and South borrowed almost all their 

 commercial and mechanical aid from her resources, 

 she could control by her superior genius not only 

 her own but the destiny of nearly the whole coun- 

 trj'. Not so, now ; and as her natural resources 

 are so inferior to the West, she must foster what 

 she has with a more steady care than in the past. 

 She must be less fickle and more devoted to the 

 solid and steady elements of prosperity always 

 within her reach. Extremes should not meet with 

 such rapidity as in some of her products and la- 

 bors. There has been no time since the settle- 

 ment of the New England States, when they could 

 not have raised their own wool, and thus have 

 saved untold wealth now distributed in the South 

 to sow seeds of rebellion, and spent upon the 

 plains of India and Australia to fatten the growth 

 of foreign, though decaying nationalities, — to make 

 the rich richer, and the poor poorer. This is not 

 the only evil to New England. She has not only 

 fed other nations from her hard-earned store, but 

 by this importing system, for, the supply of her 

 raw material for manufactures, she has raised up 

 a class of commercial men who are non-produc- 

 ers, who eat up the substance of the producers. 

 This latter system has bred another still worse, 

 and which at the present moment is doing more 

 to impoverish the North than any other one thing 

 — that is the commission system of selling goods. 

 This is purely a New England institution, so far 

 as its introduction and nurture is concerned. At 

 the present moment that system is absorbing more 

 of the real profits of the laborer and mechanic at 

 the card, the spinning-Avheel and the loom, than 

 that made from the whole process and capital of 

 the manufacturer. It has built up an artificial 

 credit system, which will ultimately prove ruinous 

 to those who practice it. 



A most extravagant set of young men are being 

 raised up, who learn nothing of wool raising or 

 manufacturing, but who hold the business in their 

 hands as a matter of trade, and who keep the 

 manufacturer down to a sense of miserable expec- 

 tancy and nervous irritability all the time. All this 

 grows out of the non-production of our raw ma- 

 terial, and an overstrained and artificial method 

 of selling the goods manufactured, simply because 

 we do not produce our raw material, which is pui-e- 

 ly within our own hands, and then trust it to the 

 hands of merchandise brokers to sell instead of 

 doing it ourselves, as the English and other na- 

 tions do. Thus by extremes we lose our sub- 

 stance, and encourage an artificial state of exist- 



ence, which, above all other nations in the world, 

 we can least afford to do. We neglect wool, flax, 

 hemp, corn, wheat and maple sugar, all of which 

 would prove profitable to the farmer as well as 

 every other branch of New England industry and 

 finance, and spend our time and strength on ex- 

 periments of an hundred and fifty varieties of 

 pears, and disquisitions on the root crop and sor- 

 ghum, with an occasional essay on manures, which 

 brings up a conflict at once between Berkshire and 

 Essex, — the same principle being claimed for both 

 locations, whether the soil and climate of the I'e- 

 spective places are harmonious or not, or at all 

 fitted for the crops proposed. 



These points are particularly familiar to the 

 writer, from an attendance, (almost a silent one,) 

 for four years of the agricultural meetings at the 

 State House. A few plain, practical discussions 

 of a subject will often produce much good to the 

 farmer, but icoe to the j'lioneer, that happens to be 

 a little out of the fashion of the times, and ven- 

 tures to suggest subjects that are staid and well 

 tried, but which do not carry the enthusiasm of 

 change upon them. It has been said that innova- 

 tion is not always improvement, and it is pre-emi- 

 nently true in regard to the changes in the agri- 

 culture of New England. No crop so valuable as 

 wool, in many senses ; none so easily raised, at 

 least in the interior of the State, and yet how 

 much and how long it has been neglected. Even 

 a discussion of this subject a few years since, was 

 received with coldness, and when the subject of 

 the culture of flax was brought up, in 1851, and 

 again in 1859 it was fairly scouted at. How is it 

 now ? Why, nearly every old buck that can claim 

 a lineage the other side of the water is marked up 

 to a fabulous price, while flax is to be the product 

 of every farm, yea hot-house in the country. Ex- 

 tremes again ! Wool is wanted ; let it be raised 

 on the common-sense principle. Blood is much, 

 breeding more, care is more still, and of this we 

 can bestow in plenty. The pastoral ! Is there 

 anything more beautiful to contemplate in agri- 

 culture than this ? 



"While shepherds watch their flocks by night I" 



How beautiful ! All sacred history reveres the 

 interest and beauty of the shepherd's life, and 

 proves in this, as well as the thousand other sacred 

 principles, that simplicity and naturalness is the 

 true foster father of happiness as well as prosper- 

 ity. Take care of the sheep ! They will feed and 

 clothe you. The pastoral care of modern day is 

 beautifully set forth in Spanish literature, from 

 which we learn more of the true theory of sheep- 

 raising than from any other nation, while the qual- 

 ity of wool has ever been of the first order. The 

 king of Spain, as early as the middle of the four- 

 teenth century, placed himself at the head of 

 sheep-raising. A tribunal called the ''Mesta," for 

 the regulation of sheep-growing was formed by the 

 chief owners of migratory flocks, the king being 

 the merino mayor. This class of wool, once so 

 celebrated, is obtained from the migratory sheep 

 of Spain. It has been said that the number of 

 these sheep in Spain amounts to ten millions, 

 which twice a year are led a journey of four hun- 

 dred miles ; the right was claimed for them of 

 grazing all the open and common lanes laying in 

 the way, as also a path ninety yards in width 

 through all the enclosed and cultivated country, 

 and other travellers were prohibited passing when 



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