26 



cess have been exalted, and the imagination of the farmer boy 

 has been fired with visions of power and eminence in the midst 

 of the great wcrld be3^ond. 



The several economic changes I have enumerated, assisted 

 by the unequal contest in legislative halls and in commerce be- 

 tween unsyndicated agriculture and syndicated industrial inter- 

 ests, have caused certain far-reaching results. New England 

 and Middle State farmers could not meet western competition 

 and during the last decades of the nineteenth century they suf- 

 fered serious business hardships because they were unable to 

 at once abandon old lines of production and enter upon new 

 enterprises that were profitable. This immense expansion of 

 our cultivated lands and the competition that rapid and cheap 

 transportation has made possible between widely separated 

 points not only depressed eastern agriculture but caused a read- 

 justment of the areas of particular farm products .according to 

 special soil and climate adaptations and business opportunity. 

 New England must now produce that with which the west can 

 least successfully compete. 



Again in the twenty years between 1880 and 1900 the open 

 country of the eastern states became seriously depopulated. 

 During this period the population of New York, the state in 

 which I live, diminished 730,000 in places of less than 4,000 

 persons, and in Maine the decrease was more than 70,000 over 

 10% of all her people. This result, due to a depressed eastern 

 agriculture, the attraction of western homesteads, the central- 

 ization of industrial life in the cities, and the commercial spirit ■ 

 that has seized us, was inevitable. It was merely a distribution 

 of population on the basis of opportunity, and no amount of 

 sentiment, or philosophy or education, could have stopped it 

 or very much modified it. A great deal has been written dur- 

 ing the past few decades about keeping the boys from leaving 

 the farm, and various causes for this desertion of the soil have 

 been assigned. Appeals have been made to fathers and moth- 

 ers, to the schools and to the college of agriculture to cure this 

 agricultural unregeneracy on the part of farm boys and girls, 

 but ,nothing could have neutralized the powerful influence of a 

 widespread readjustment of business and the young men and 

 women went where conditions forced them to go, in fact where 

 manv of them were needed. 



