No. 129.] 337 



The judgment of this impartial stranger appears in the following 

 quotations : 



Page 26, "Land in America affords little pleasure or profit, 

 and appears in a progress of affording less." Page 31 , " Virginia 

 is in a rapid decline." Page 38, "Land in New- York, formerly 

 producing twenty bushels of wheat to the acre, now produces 

 only ten." Page 41, "Little profit can be found in the present 

 mode of agriculture of this country, and I apprehend it to be a 

 fact that it affords a hare subsistence." Page 45, " Virginia is the 

 southern limit of my inquiries, because agriculture had there 

 already arrived to its lowest state of degradation." Page 49, 

 "The land owners in this State are, with a few exceptions, in low 

 circumstances; the inferior rank of them, wretched in the ex- 

 treme." Page 52, " Decline has pervaded all the States." 



Upon reading the opinion of this disinterested foreigner, my 

 impressions were indignation, alarm, conviction; inspired suc- 

 cessively by a love of country, fear for its welfare, and a recol- 

 lection of facts. The terrible fact that the strongest cord which 

 vibrates on the heart of man, cannot tie our people to the natal 

 spot, that they view it with horror and flee from it to new elimes 

 with joy, and lead to an ultimate recoil from this exhausted re- 

 source to an exhausted country. 



A patient must know that he is sick, before he will take physic. 

 One fact apparent to the most superficial observer is, that our land 

 has diminished in fertility. It is the object of agriculture, as an 

 art, not to impoverish, but to increase its natural fertility. Its 

 object being to furnish man with articles of the first necessity, 

 whatever defeats that object is a crime of the first magnitude! 

 Had men the power to obscure or brighten the light of the sun, 

 by obscuring it they would imitate the morality of diminishing 

 the fertility of the earth. Is not one as criminal as the other? 



Had the products of agriculture kept pace with the increase of 

 population for the last sixty or seventy years past, (that is, since 

 about 1750,) the native agricultural exports of the United States, 



[Assembly, No. 129.] 22 



