authority on the subject, holds that this minute subdivision of land will be peculiarly favorable to the cultivation of cotton.

Of the 3,800,000 farms, approximately, into which the cultivated area of the United States is divided, 60 or even 70 per cent are cultivated by their owners. In the Northern States the proportion rises to 80 per cent or even higher. Connecticut, Maine, and Massachusetts, of the New England States, and Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, of the Northwestern States, show an excess of 90 per cent. The rent of leased farms in New England is in a large majority of cases paid in money. In all other sections of the country rents are generally stipulated to be paid in some definite share of the produce, the proportion in many of the Southern and Western States being three, four, or five farms rented for shares of the produce to one for which a money rent is paid.1

in the South Atlantic States the decrease continued down to 1900. The following table shows the average number of acres per farm in the various geographic divisions in each census year since 1850.

1 Of the 5,739,657 farms enumerated by the census in 1900 the various forms of tenure were as follows:

Second. Of the character of the cultivators of the soil in the United States it will not be necessary to speak at length. Confining our view to the country north of the Potomac and the Ohio, we say that, unlike the cultivators in any country of Europe except Switzerland and, perhaps, Scotland, they have at no stage of our history constituted a peasantry in any proper sense of the term. The actual cultivators of the soil here have been the same kind of men precisely as those who filled the professions or were engaged in commercial and mechanical pursuits. Of two sons of the same mother one became a lawyer, perhaps a judge, or went down to the city and became a merchant, or gave himself to political affairs and became a governor or a member of Congress; the other stayed upon the ancestral homestead, or made a new one for himself and his children out of the public domain farther west, remaining through his life a plain hard-working farmer.

Now this condition of things has made American to differ from European agriculture by a very wide interval. There is no other considerable country in the world where the same mental activity and alertness have been applied to the cultivation of the soil as to trade and so-called industry.

We have the less occasion to dwell now upon this theme, because we shall be called to note, under several heads following, striking illustrations of the effects of this cause in promoting the success of American agriculture.

And while the character of the native cultivators of the soil. has been such as described, those who have come to us from foreign countries have caught the time and step and the spirit of the national movement with wonderful ease. As recruits received into an old regiment, with veterans behind, before, and on either side, with examples everywhere of the right way of doing things, and breathing an atmosphere surcharged with soldierly instincts, are soon scarcely to be distinguished from the heroes of ten campaigns, so the Germans, the Scandinavians, and, though in a less degree, the Irish and French Canadians, who have made their homes where they are surrounded by the native agriculturists, have become in a short time almost as

good Yankees, if not too near the frontier of settlement, as if they had been born upon the hills of Vermont.

While the cultivating class at the North has been as thus hastily characterized, at the South the soil was, until the War of the Rebellion, tilled by a race of blacks degraded and brutalized so far as is implied in a system of chattel slavery. Upon the fruits of their labor the master lived, either in luxury or in squalor, according to the number of those whose unpaid services he could command. The great majority of the slave-holding class lived far more meanly than ordinary mechanics at the North, or even than the common day laborers among us.

Of the 384,000 slaveholders of 1860, 20 per cent owned one slave each; 21 per cent more owned but two or three; those who owned five slaves or fewer comprised 55 per cent of the entire number; while 72 per cent had less than ten slaves, including men, women, and children. To the vast majority of this class slavery meant, simply and solely, shirking work; and to enjoy this blessed privilege they were content to live in miserable huts, eat the coarsest food, and wear their butternutcolored homespun. The slave worked just as little as he could, and just as poorly as he dared; ate everything on which he could lay his hands without having the lash laid on his back; and wasted and spoiled on every side, not from a malicious intention, but because he was ignorant, clumsy, and stupid, or at least stupefied. The master lived upon whatever he could wrest from laborers of this class. Of the planters with seven cabins or families of slaves, averaging five each, including house servants, aged invalids, and children, Mr. Frederick Law Olmsted, in his work on "The Cotton Kingdom," estimated the income "to be hardly more than that of a private of the New York metropolitan police force." Yet there were only about 20,000 slaveholders in 1860 who held slaves in excess of this number. Of these two or three thousand lived in something like state and splendor.

What the industrial outcome of the abolition of slavery will be it is yet too early to decide; but we already know that we are past the danger of "a second Jamaica," of which we had

once a reasonable fear. The blacks are already under the impulse of their own wants, working better than they did beneath the lash, and those wants are likely to increase in number and intensity.

As to the poor whites of the South, I am disposed to believe that they are preparing for us a great surprise. We have been accustomed to think of them as brutalized by slavery until they had become lazy, worthless, and vicious. Perhaps we shall find that the poor whites have been suppressed rather than degraded, and that beneath the hunting-fishing-lounging habit which slavery generated and maintained lies a native shrewdness almost passing Yankee wit, an indomitable pluck, such as has made the fights of Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg memorable forever in the history of mankind, and an energy which, when turned from horse races, street fights, cocking mains, hunting, and fishing, to breaking up the ground, felling the forest, running the mill, exploiting the mine, and driving trade, may yet realize all the possibilities of that fair land.

Third. To ascertain what are the adaptations of any piece of ground to the cultivation of any single crop, and what variety and order of crops will best bring out the capabilities of soil and climate in the production of wealth, may seem a simple thing, but it is not. It is so far from being a simple thing that a race of men, not barbarous, but, as we call them, civilized, may inhabit a region for an indefinite period and this thing not be done at all. Such may be the lack of enterprise, such the force of tradition, that crops may be cultivated from generation to generation, and from century to century, while the question has never yet been fairly determined whether the agriculture of the district might not advantageously be reënforced, and the soil be relieved, by the introduction of new crops, or even by throwing out the traditionary crops altogether.

6

Gonzales in his "Tour of England" (1730) wrote: "And my tutor told me that a good author of their own made this remark of Wiltshire, that an ox left to himself would, of all England, choose to live in the north of this county, a sheep in the south part of it, and a man in the middle of both, as partaking of the

pleasure of the plain and the plenty of the deep country.' The remark does not exaggerate the nicety of those distinctions which determine the range of the profitable cultivation whether of an animal or a vegetable species. A certain rough canvass of the agricultural capabilities of any district is easily made, and a process of elimination early takes place by which certain crops are discarded, for once and for all, as hopeless. But among the great variety of crops which may be cultivated in any region, justly to discriminate between the good and the very good, and to reject those which, though within the "limit of tolerance," as the money-writers say, are yet on the whole, and in the long run, not profitable, demands long, careful, and elaborate experimentation. Beyond this is the selection of varieties within the retained species, in which alone may reside the possibilities of success or failure; the fortunate choice of varieties, among the almost indefinite number, often making all the difference between profit and no profit.

To do this work satisfactorily requires great mental enterprise and what we may call curiosity, a natural delight in experimentation, a ready apprehension combined with persistency, in due measure, and with a sound judgment. To do this work both well and quickly, being neither slow in testing new and promising subjects, nor easily discouraged by the accidents which beset initiation and experiment, nor yet reluctant in drawing the proper inference from failure, would task the intellectual powers of any race of men.

In Europe the knowledge of soils and of climate, on which the cultivation of large estates or personal properties is based, is the accumulation of hundreds of years of experience. In the United States the course of settlement has called upon our people to occupy virgin territory as extensive as Switzerland, as England, as Italy, and latterly as France or Germany, every ten years. And it has been in meeting the necessity of a rapid, rough-and-ready reconnoissance of new soils under varying climatic conditions that the character of our cultivating class, as indicated under the previous title, has come most strikingly into play.