machinery, is almost unknown among our native northern people. Not one in ten but has the mechanical sense and skill necessary for the purpose.

But it has not been through the invention and wide application of agricultural machinery alone that the peculiar and extraordinary mechanical genius of our people has increased our national capacity for agricultural production. In what we may call the daily commonplace use of this faculty, throughout what may be termed the pioneer period, and, in a diminishing degree, through each successive stage of settlement and industrial development, the American farmer has derived from this source an advantage beyond estimation in dealing with the perpetually varying exigencies of the occupation and cultivation of the soil. Perhaps we cannot better illustrate this than by referring to a recent exhibition of our national activity in another field.

When the War of the Rebellion broke out no one supposed that the American armies, hastily raised and commanded by men tried only in civil affairs, were to give lessons to the engineers of Europe. Yet, after our war had been going on about two years, it came to be apprehended that a new force had been introduced into warfare, causing an almost total revolution in field operations. The soldiers of the Union and Confederate armies, left almost to themselves in the matter, had gradually but rapidly developed a system of field intrenchments the like of which had never been executed by any army or conceived by any engineer. Not only between night and morning, but often in the course of four or even three hours, was it found possible for infantry to cover their front with works adequate to a complete protection from musketry and from the casual fire of field guns.

This system of intrenchment was a spontaneous, original creation on the part of many different bodies of troops. The officers who served most uninterruptedly through the campaigns of 1862 and 1863 could hardly presume to say when and where it first took distinct and recognizable shape. Those who have followed the course of military opinion in Europe and are familiar with the history of recent wars there, know how greatly the

theory and practice of field operations have been changed as the result of the introduction of the American system of rapid, rough-and-ready intrenchment. The works along the Rapidan, the Pamunkey, or the Appomattox were contemptible enough, viewed as finished products, irrespective of the time expended; but in the fact that such works could be thrown up in the interval between the arrival of the head and of the rear of a column, or in half a night, lay possibilities of almost infinite consequence to the strategist.

Now just what, in spirit, our soldiers were doing in 1863, 1864, and 1865 our farmers had been doing all through the pioneer period of every new state, and though in a lower degree, in meeting the later and less pressing exigencies of agricultural extension and improvement. The way in which the pioneer of New England birth or blood, stopping his cattle in a wilderness, miles from any neighbor, and tumbling ax and spade, bundles and babies out upon unbroken ground, which he was to make his home, set about the task of providing shelter for his children and his animals, clearing the ground and getting a first crop out of the soil, were not admirable merely as an exhibition of courage, faith, and enterprise; but, if we look at the results accomplished in the light of the time and labor expended, it constitutes a triumph of mechanical, we might say of engineering, genius. The simple record of the first five years on a pioneer farm on the Western Reserve of Ohio, were it possible to set it forth in such a way that one could see that life in the wilderness lived over again, that work in the wilderness done over again, would produce upon a mind capable of appreciating the highest human achievements a stronger impression of the intellectual power and originality of the American people than all the literature we have accumulated since Joel Barlow wrote his "Vision of Columbus."

Sixth. When we ask what has been done chemically to promote American agriculture, we reach at once the most characteristic differences between our cultivation of the soil and that prevailing in older countries; and we have, at the same time, the explanation of the contemptuous manner in which our

agriculture is almost universally spoken of by European writers. Did I say contemptuous? The word "indignant" would often better express the feeling aroused in these writers by the contemplation of our dealing with the soil, which, from their point of view, they cannot but regard as wasteful, wanton earth butchery. "In perusing the volumes of Messrs. Parkinson, Faux, Fearon, and others," says Hinton, in his "History of the United States," "some hundred pages of invective occur because the Americans will persist in taking up fresh land instead of the more costly process of manuring a worn-out soil will raise extensive crops instead of highly cultivating and beautifying a small space."

A few British tourists, indeed, notably Professor Johnston and Mr. James Caird, have shown a somewhat juster appreciation of American agriculture; but even these have given only a qualified approval of our method of dealing with the soil, and have fallen ludicrously short of the truth in attempting to fix the limit of time during which this policy could be maintained.

Johnston, one of the best writers of his time on agricultural chemistry, publishing his "Notes on North America" in 1851, expressed his belief that the exportable wheat of the continent, as a whole, was "already a diminishing quantity." In the light of to-day the following reads somewhat strangely :

It is fair and reasonable, therefore, I think, to conclude, until we have better data, that the wheat-exporting capabilities of the United States are not so great as they have by many in Great Britain hitherto been supposed; that they have been overstated on the spot, and that our wheat growers at home have been unduly alarmed by these distant thunders, the supposed prelude of an imaginary torrent of American wheat, which was to overwhelm everything in Great Britain, involving farmers and landlords in one common ruin.

Undue alarm; distant thunders; supposed prelude; imaginary torrent! Nothing so good as that had been said since the profane scoffer told the son of Lamech to go along with his old ark; it wasn't going to be much of a shower after all.

What, then, has been this American way of dealing with the soil to which our English brethren have so strongly made objection?

The American people finding themselves on a continent containing an almost limitless breadth of arable land of fair average fertility, having little accumulated capital and many urgent occasions for every unit of labor power they could exert, have elected -and in so doing they are, I make bold to say, fully justified, on sound economical principles-to regard the land as practically of no value and labor as of high value; have, in pursuance of this theory of the case, systematically cropped their fields, on the principle of obtaining the largest crops with the least expenditure of labor, limiting their improvements to what was required for the immediate purpose specified, and caring little about returning to the soil any equivalent for the properties taken from it by the crops of each successive year. What has been returned has been only the manure generated incidentally to the support of the live stock needed to work the farm. In that which is for the time the great wheat and corn region of the United States the fields are, as a rule, cropped continuously, without fertilization, year after year, decade after decade, until their fertility sensibly declines.

Decline under this regimen it must, sooner or later, later or sooner, according to the crop and according to the degree of original strength in the soil. Resort must then be had to new fields of virgin freshness, which with us in the United States has always meant "the West." When Professor Wharton wrote, the granary of the continent had already moved from the flats of the lower St. Lawrence to the Mississippi valley, the northand-south line which divided the wheat product of the United States into two equal parts being approximately the line of the 82d meridian. In 1860 it was the 85th; in 1870, the 88th; in 1880, the 89th.

Meanwhile what becomes of the regions over which this shadow of partial exhaustion passes, like an eclipse, in its westward movement? The answer is to be read in the condition of New England to-day. A part of the agricultural population is maintained by raising upon limited soils the smaller crops, garden vegetables and orchard fruits, and producing butter, milk, poultry, and eggs for the supply of the cities and

manufacturing towns which had their origin in the flourishing days of agriculture, which have grown with the age of the communities in which they are planted, and which, having been well founded when the decadence of agriculture begins, flourish the more on this account, inasmuch as a second part of the agricultural population, not choosing to follow the westward movement of the grain culture, are ready with their rising sons and daughters to enter the mill and factory.

Still another part of the agricultural population gradually becomes occupied in the higher and more careful culture of the cereal crops on the better portion of the former breadth of arable land, the less eligible fields being allowed to spring up in brush and wood; deeper plowing and better drainage are resorted to; fertilizers are now employed to bring up and to keep up the pristine fertility of the soil.

And thus begins the serious systematic agriculture of an old state. Something is done in wheat, but not much. New York raised thirteen million bushels in 1850; thirty years later, when her population had increased 70 per cent, she raises thirteen million bushels. Pennsylvania raised fifteen and a half million bushels in 1850, with a population of two and a quarter millions; in 1880, with four and a half million inhabitants, she raises nineteen and a half million bushels. New Jersey raised one million six hundred thousand bushels then; she raises one million nine hundred thousand now.1

More is done in corn, that magnificent and most prolific cereal; more still in buckwheat, barley, oats, and rye. Pennsylvania, though the tenth state in wheat production, stands first of all the Union in rye, second in buckwheat, and third in oats; New York, the same New York whose Mohawk and Genesee valleys were a proverb through the world forty years ago, is but the thirteenth state in wheat, but is first in buckwheat, second in barley, and third in rye.2

1 In 1899 New York produced but 10,412,675 bushels of wheat, and New Jersey but 1,902,590. — ED.

2 In 1899 New York stood second in buckwheat, seventh in barley, and third in rye. — ED.