value of the laborer and the land. For, with increase in value, division of the land naturally follows. Great plantations would become small ones, each of which would yield more than is now yielded by the whole. Small farms would come, cultivated by negro tenants, who step by step are becoming free, while their masters are becoming rich."

But this peaceful solution was not to be. To the blighting effects of a mistaken policy, was added the scourge and desolation of war! All honor to the noble spirits, north and south, who labored with their might to hold a united country to the pursuits of peace; and, failing in this, waited for the cloud to pass, ready to rebuild the waste places, and lay the foundations of an everlasting commonwealth. In this glorious work the Grange is to-day the most efficient helper. The South is of vast extent and resources. Hard as it is to restore land without animals, and hard as it is to obtain forage upon land that is thin and poor, “there is life in the old land yet;" its hills are seamed with iron and coal; it has gold and lead, limestone and salt. Above all it has children, than whom none are more noble; with great memories of a brilliant past, and everything to hope for in the future.

Louisiana, whose sugar industry was her strength, who has suffered so much from the war, is still enduring an almost total eclipse of productive energy. The want of capital, and the want of confidence, are serious obstacles, to which the want of labor may be added. Her late slave population forsook the country for the towns and cities; the planters were forced to employ imported Chinese laborers in their place. Add to this the wasteful system of manufacture of the cane sugar-which M. Boucherau believes to result in the actual burning up of a hundred millions of sugar annually,—and we can realize the · relations of social order to progress, in any direction. The acreage of sugar production is now small-not more than one hundred and fifty thousand acres; Louisiana might supply the whole United States. Her condition is one which every State in the Union is interested in improving, especially those to whom she offers facilities for building up a vast interior commerce.

Texas, the largest State in area, is yet small enough in population to offer a camping-ground for half the discontented nations of Europe. Lands as good as the sun shines upon may

THE SEVEN WONDERS OF NEW ENGLAND.

53

be had for twenty to forty cents an acre.

She raises the finest corn and cotton; her flocks abound; she needs only wisdom in her councils, to make herself the seat of a great southern civilization.

CHAPTER VI.

AGRICULTURE IN THE EASTERN AND MIDDLE STATES.

“The country's flinty face
Like wax their fashioning skill Letrays,
To fill the hollows, sink the bills,
Bridge gulfs, drain swamps, build dams and mills,
And fit the bleak and howling placo
For gardens of a finer race"-R. W. Emerson.

VALUE OF STATISTICAL REPORTS-HIGHEST AVERAGE YIELD OF WHEAT IN Massa.

CHUSETTS--A SOUTHERN VIEW OF NEW ENGLAND--VALUE OF Hay CROP-VERMONT AND THE WOOL INTEREST--WHAT THE NEW ENGLAND STATES RAISE AND WHAT THEY EAT--THE EMPIRE STATE--GENESEE WHEAT--THE WEEVIL_FISH AND FOR CELTURE-PROFITS OF CHEESE AND BUTTER FACTORIES—MR. ARNOLD OY THE FUTURE OF DAIRYING-PENNSYLVANIA AND HER COLONIES–NEW JERSEY A MARKET GARDEN – CRANBERRY CULTURE-PEACII CULTURE IN DELAWARE AND MARYLAND.

COMPARISONS are odious; but it is only by their constant use that we are able to form correct estimates either of our standing or of our progress. The reader will find appended at the close of Part First several tables made up from the reports of the Agricultural Department at Washington, which will enable him to estimate the great value of such information. He will observe that the average yield of wheat per acre is larger in Massachusetts than in any State except Oregon; while that of tobacco is greater by two thirds than in any of the so-called tobacco States. However small the acreage may be, the increase in the average productiveness, year by year, is a test of successful agriculture. With the poorest soil and most trying climate, New England has contrived her remarkable success, "spinning her improvements out of her own bowels, as a spider spins its web.” She has done this mainly by the application of brains to her affairs. The results tersely described in a Southern journal of the year 1848, are far more marked at the present time.

“ The seven wonders of New England,” in the eyes of a Southern traveler:

1. Every man is living in a bran, span new house, or one that looks as if it had been painted as white as snow within the past week.

2. All the houses are of wood, while all the fences are of stone, which in some places lie so thick as to require to be removed at the rate of a ton from six feet square.

3. Wood for house and kitchen all sawed and split up into one uniform length and size, and snugly piled away under cover of an open shed, so that the work of house and kitchen may suffer the least possible interruption; in a word, a place for everything and everything in its place.

4. The care obviously bestowed in the saving and preparation of manure by accumulation and composting.

5. Universal attention to a bountiful supply of vegetables and fruit adapted to the climate.

6. Not a poor or superfluous ox, cow, horse, hog, or sheep; the proportion of the short-lived, expensive horse, being, on the farm, wisely and economically small.

7. The seventh wonder is, after a day's ride in stages at seven and a half miles an hour, or on railroads at thirty, where are these people's staple crops? What do they make for sale? Where are their stack-yards of wheat, straw and fodder? Where their tobacco-houses and gin-houses; their great herds of cattle and swine, rooting in the swamps, browsing in the fields, or reposing in the shade? How do they contrive to keep out of debt, and never repudiate? How do they go on improving their rocky farms, carrying stun from their hills to under-drain their meadows, building school-houses within sight of each other, and expending millions on education, while, buying for themselves, one a little bank stock, another a little railroad stock, or that of a neighboring factory, where he sells his milk, apples, poultry and potatoes; once in a while adding to his farm by paying one hundred dollars an acre for some smaller parcel in the neighborhood. The key to the riddle is, diversity of industries in general, and of agriculture in particular.”

The same writer speaks of the eighth wonder, viz., that one county in Massachusetts, to which was apportioned two thousand dollars of the surplus money distributed by the general government, “to be loaned on good security to the farmers of said county," could not find a farmer who wanted to borrow money. This, it must be confessed, was more than thirty years ago, before the era of bonds and subsidies.

a

DESTRUCTION OF PASTURAGE.

55

This flattering picture shows what energy and economy of time and labor may accomplish with indifferent materials. The records of the State Agricultural Society, and Legislature of Massachusetts prove with what zeal she has set herself to correct her own mistakes. A committee on “exhausted pastures" issues a circular inquiring of the owners of pasture lands if they are exhausted in any degree; what amount of stock they will carry; what amount they carried ten, twenty, and even forty years ago; what have been the results of sheep pasturage, and other questions, the replies to which, published and widely circulated, make every reading farmer understand how much of his land is taken away in milk; why his cows gnaw at old bones, and what must be done to keep them from gnawing. A recent lecture by Prof. Stockbridge, of the Agricultural College, before the State Board of Agriculture, illustrates the usefulness of such investigations so well that no apology is needed for quoting it here:

I find we have said to each other, and to the world, that the hay crop is the most valuable of any single crop cultivated; that the hay and grass crop combined is worth in the aggregate, in the United States, somewhere between five and six hundred millions of dollars. This is its money value; and, more than all that, we have said to the farmers of the country, that its value in dollars and cents is as nothing compared with its indirect value, in the influence it has in preserving the fertility of our farms, as being the great source of manurial supply. We have said that no farm can be kept in a high state of fertility, or do otherwise than depreciate, if in its ordinary management, we sell the hay produced upon it; and no man's farm is supporting itself or him, where the grass crop is depreciating. So great is the value of the grass crop of the country, that we can afford to take our best soils up, and to bring our poorer soils to the highest degree of fertility for the production of feed. Now in regard to our pasture lands. The Board of Agriculture have agreed unanimously to this: that there has been a great deterioration in the producing power of our pastures for the last fifty or one hundred years; that the time was when our hill-sides yielded an abundance of sweet, nutritious grasses, which made milk, butter, cheese and beef of splendid quality. Our pastures do this no longer, and the brambles and briars growing in the place of those sweet, natural grasses, do not do it. The cause of the deterioration is apparent; it is because we have been building up animal structures or manufacturing cattle products which have been taken away from the fields which produced them, never to return; that when all the products have not been transported to the market, we have taken the milk for the manufacture of butter and cheese; and the manurial qualities that were contained in the milk left at home, have been given to other fields, instead of being carried back to the pastures which produced

them; and that we have thus been sending away hundreds of tons annually from those New England pastures in the form of phosphates and sulphates in the bones of animals, and nitrogen in their muscles and tissues.

Again, we have said to the world, that from one third to one fourth of all these pasture lands should never have been deprived of their original forest covering. We cannot keep the soil in place in pasture or in cultivation. Our mountains and hill-sides should not only be allowed to go back again to forests; this should be assisted by systematic effort. The effect of this would be to shelter our cultivated lands, to make our climate more equable, and to give us a more equal distribution of rain, instead of having alternate seasons of drought and floods.

Of the Agricultural College of Massachusetts, and her large contributions to agricultural knowledge, mention will be made in another connection. She leads all the States in respect to an enlightened, agricultural economy, and is the pattern followed by the rest of New England.

Vermont, making her maple woods more than supply her own sugar, has always been sufficient for herself. She has played an important part in developing the wool interest of the whole country. The Spanish and French merino sheep, introduced by Consul Jarvis, of Weathersfield, have been improved by late importations, until the Vermont flocks have become standards of excellence. Her Morgan, Black Hawk and Ham

. bletonian horses have enjoyed an equally high reputation.

Of the six States east of the Hudson, Vermont comes nearest to raising its own bread, producing 454,000 bushels of wheat in 1869, or a bushel and a peck to each inhabitant; taking the army ration of twenty-two ounces of flour per day as a basis for computing the consumption of bread, it follows that Vermont raises bread enough to supply the people of the State thirty-seven days, and that to make up the deficiency, they are obliged to purchase 3,836,000 bushels per annum.

Maine makes the next best showing in the cultivation of wheat, producing in 1869, 278,000 bushels, sufficient to last eleven days, and purchasing 8,500,000 bushels. New Hampshire, with a decreasing population, was a trifle behind Maine, producing 193,000 bushels, a little more than half a bushel to each inhabitant-and purchasing 4,360,000 bushels, or ten day's supply.

Connecticut makes a much poorer show than New Hampshire, producing 38,000 bushels, enough to supply the people