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powerful combination has transformed the sandy plains of Norfolk, for centuries abandoned to the rabbit, into luxuriant fields of wheat, clover, and turnips; and changed the fens of Lincolnshire, which encircle the old town of Boston-fens, for centuries, the resort of wild ducks, geese, and other birds of passage, into the granary of England.

"The soil of Belgium was originally sand and clay alone. It has been enriched by ashes and composts, until it has become a rich, black, loamy mould. Tanks are provided on the farms for liquids, and each cow is estimated to produce ten tons of solid, and twelve of liquid manures. Every expedient is resorted to, both to increase their quantity and to improve their quality. Rotation of crops followed; and the result of these efforts is, that Belgium sustains a population of three hundred and fifty people, sixty-seven cattle, and seventeen horses, to the square mile; usually raises her own breadstuffs, and exports wheat, madder, flax, wool, and bark, to other parts of Europe In Holland, where the dike, steam-engine, and wind-mill are employed to prevent the incursion of the sea upon land gained from its bosom, a population of two hundred and fourteen to the mile is sustained, and large exports made of butter, cheese, and other agricultural products. The average value of land is nearly three hundred dollars per acre, although it is burthened with opppressive taxes.*

"To learn the causes of the astonishing fertility and large returns flowing from the conquests of art over nature, we must recur to the history of Belgium and Holland. For centuries they have been the seats of commerce and the arts.

"In the eleventh century, Ghent and Bruges, cities of Belgium, were important commercial towns, and supplied the courts of Europe with silks and tapestries. In the fifteenth century, Ghent contained fifty thousand weavers, and Bruges and Antwerp had each two hundred thousand people, and were the marts of the civilized world. In the sixteenth century, the harbor of Antwerp often contained two thousand five hundred vessels; her gates were daily entered by five hundred loaded wagons; and her magnificent Exchange, still standing, erected before the discovery of America, was attended twice a day by five thousand merchants.

"The country was covered with roads and canals; capital and art were applied to agriculture. The effect of a population, growing in numbers and wealth, was to stimulate the efforts of those engaged in agriculture; and, for six hundred years, commerce, manufactures and agriculture grew together, until the latter attained a height which has survived the wars and revolutions which nearly prostrated the former.

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Holland, too, has been, for centuries, the seat of manufactures, commerce, and wealth. In the seventeenth century Holland was the great naval power of the age, and controlled the trade of the Indies. Her shipping, 900,000 tons, equalled that of all the other powers of Europe; and her great cities, united to

Holland annually exports thirty-eight million pounds of cheese, and eighteen million pounds of butter. The average rate of the land tax, on farms, is ten to fourteen guilders per arpent-about three dollars per acre.

gether, and to the Rhine by canals, the admiration of Europe, were each devoted to some great branch of manufactures or commerce. From these agriculture received a mighty impulse.

"When England became the queen of the seas, and the patron of the arts— when she had invented the steam engine and the spinning-jenny, and applied her beds of coal to the production of iron-when she had opened her canals, and begun to build docks and harbors, a stimulus was given to agriculture, and wealth and science were drawn to districts which had lain dormant for centuries. They were both applied to the improvement of land. Soils were analyzed; tools of all kinds improved; lime and plaster transported by canals to the spot that required them; bone dust collected from the battle-fields of Europe, from La Plata and California; dikes and drains constructed; oil-cake, imported, even from our county of Middlesex, to fatten her cattle and enrich her soil; and vessels were sent around Cape Horn to procure the excrement of birds. The produce of agriculture has been thus more than doubled, and her inhabitants carried to an average of three hundred per square mile, consuming food and occupying houses vastly superior to those of their fathers.

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England and Wales, with less than 60,000 square miles of surface, sustain 18,000,000 people, 26,000,000 sheep, 4,000,000 head of cattle, and 1,500,000 horses, in a condition unrivalled in any section of the world, and produce annually, beside, at least 240,000,000 bushels of breadstuffs.

"The county of Lancashire, the great seat of the cotton manufacture, the Middlesex of England, presents results more striking than those of the island at large. It has increased with a rapidity almost unexampled in the history of industry, and exhibits a population of 1,800,000, or 1,000 to the mile, on a space of but 1,800 square miles, an area barely equal to our two counties of Worcester and Middlesex.

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Lancashire, like our Middlesex, is studded with factories, and covered by a net-work of railroads and canals. Its soil, like that of Middlesex, is devoted principally to the culture of grass, fruit, and esculent vegetables, while its breadstuffs are drawn from other districts.

"There would seem to be something congenial to agriculture, in the very atmosphere of commerce and manufactures; for we read in the history of Carthage, by its conquerors, that around that ancient seat of trade and manufactures, and under the burning sun of Africa, there were clustered beautiful farms and country seats, canals, olive trees, and vineyards.

"The achievement of science and capital in the agriculture of the old world, lead us to appreciate aright their value, on this side of the Atlantic, and to take a more correct view of their importance and uses. A few rash experiments here, guided by no practical skill, may have led some to distrust theories and the value of book learning. Others have looked with a jaundiced eye on the accumulation of wealth-have regarded its votaries merely as a mercenary race, a class useless

to the community, instead of viewing them as stewards accumulating property for the benefit of society; forgetful that their wealth, whether invested in banks, ships, docks, or avenues of trade, or in loans upon land, is giving an impulse to the whole country.

"To insure the progress of agriculture, it is for science to indicate the path, to suggest the elements of the soil, to point out its deficiencies and the appropriate remedy, to present the improvements in tools, fences, and buildings, and the discoveries of art; but in vain would she place her finger upon these, unless her ally, capital, should follow, and furnish the stocks, tools, structures, and fertilizing substances, and aid in creating avenues from the farm to the market.

"There was a time, but few years since, when the credit of our State and country, now so elevated, was deeply depressed-when the bonds of Massachusetts found no purchasers. Science had planned that great avenue which makes Boston one of the seaports of the West; but means were wanting. By whom, think you, were they furnished? By those unfortunate Irishmen who seek here a refuge from bad laws and national calamities, who toil upon our public works, and to whom we owe all our canals, wharves, and railroads.

"The quiet accumulations of these small capitalists in the savings' bank of Boston, absorbed more than half a million of our bonds, and finished the Western Railroad.

"The progress of cities, towns, and manufactories, has created wealth, nurtured science, and aided their diffusion. Towns and cities have reacted on the country, have created a demand and liberal price for its products, and furnished it with the means of fertility, while towns and cities may trace their expansion to commerce and the arts.

"Commerce and manufactures have been fostered and stimulated by public improvements, which have collected and distributed their materials and products. The alliance thus cemented between the ship, the canal boat, the car and the spindle, the forge and the plough, has created great and prosperous nations, and verified Lord Bacon's oft-repeated theory, that three things are essential to the prosperity of a country-fertile fields, busy workshops, and easy communication.

"While, in England, the Netherlands, and portions of France, Germany, and Italy, all these advantages are enjoyed, there are extensive regions in which the fertility of nature is neutralized by the want of facilities of intercourse; and for centuries past, commerce and manufactures, population and agriculture, have languished or receded. When the Council of Castile were invited by an eminent engineer to open a canal from Madrid to the sea, they declined the invitation — coming to the sage conclusion that, if God had designed a navigable river for Madrid, he would have made it himself; and Spain, estranged from commerce and improvements, has made so little progress, that it has been wittily suggested that, were Adam to revisit this sphere, he would find the face of nature less changed, and feel himself more at home in Spain, than in any other region,

While, in England and the Netherlands, the surplus of one district supplies the deficiencies of another, in Spain, it is not unusual for one province to be desolated by famine, while an excessive crop in another has filled the granaries to overflowing, and made wheat comparatively worthless.

"In Spain, land is stationary, or declining with the decay of towns and villages; but near the towns and cities, the canals and railways, of the flourishing regions we have described, land rises in value with the improvement of cultivation, with the increased prices for its products, and with the progressive demand for sites for warehouses and country seats. It is enriched by its very vicinity to the centres of population, by the fertilizing materials it derives from them, whose weight and bulk forbid their carriage into remote districts. In this respect, lands in populous districts have a decided and preponderating advantage over those of . the interior.

"The progress of improvements, and the growth of towns in the United States are producing the same effects we have witnessed in Europe.

"The Erie and Champlain Canals, with the application of steam to the Hudson, have created, in the last twenty years, great cities, at Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, Albany, Troy, and Brooklyn, and made New York the third, if not the second ⚫ commercial city of the world.

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Singular as it may seem, many influential residents in the city of New York long opposed the Erie Canal. Her leading editors ridiculed the "big ditch" of Clinton-unable to distinguish, through the dim vista of the future, the stately warehouses, palaces, and churches, elegant avenues, and the forest of masts, with which it was to embellish the Island of Manhattan.

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Orange and Dutchess Counties anticipated that the wheat and dairy produce of the Genesee Valley would depress their farms, although more contiguous to the market of New York. On Long Island, a gentleman of my acquaintance attended an election, where his friend, the successful candidate, was chosen on the ground of his opposition to the canal.

“But the farms of Orange and Dutchess still maintain their ascendency; and such was the impulse given to Long Island, by the growth of New York after the Erie Canal had opened-such the increased demand for corn, hay, fuel, poultry, and other produce, that my acquaintance, on a second visit, found his friend again a candidate, on the ground that he had become a warm supporter of the Erie Canal.

"If canals have contributed to such results on both sides of the Atlantic, what is it reasonable to expect from the discovery of railroads?—an improvement rapidly superseding the ne plus ultra' of the preceding age.

"The same power which draws a ton upon a turnpike, draws fifteen upon a level railroad, and with four-fold the speed. The railroad combines the properties of the coach, the wagon, and the race-horse. With six-fold the speed of the canal, it regards not the snows of winter, and scales mountains impervious to

canals. How far is it essential to our seaports and factories? They require a constant and uninterrupted communication, which canals cannot give, as the ice closes them nearly half the year.

"What do those factories demand? The cotton and wool of distant States and countries; the iron and coal of Pennsylvania and Cape Breton; the lumber and lime of Maine; the indigo and drugs of India; the oil of the Pacific and of Africa; and the factory girls of all New England. Obliterate the railroads, and would their business be worth pursuing?

"Obliterate the railroads, and would not half of Boston go to decay?

"At the commencement of the railroad system in New England, some fears were entertained that the effect might be injurious to the farms which encircle our metropolis.

"This opinion was countenanced, for a brief period, by the competition of the new milk farms along the line of the Boston and Worcester Railroad, with the dairies in the suburbs, and by the depression of agricultural products through the country, which followed the commercial revulsion of 1837.

"Doubtless, some changes were effected; but have not the suburban dairy farms been required for building lots, at treble prices? Are not the streets of the metropolis extended far into the country, on seven great lines, and is not land sold by the foot, more than ten miles distant from the Merchants' Exchange of Boston? and are not farms, once supposed to be ruined by the location of railroads, like the Winship and Hunnewell estates, in Brighton and Newton, at least quadrupled in their value? Have they not shown that the railroad is by no means the road to ruin? Do not milk, butter, corn, oats, pork, and beef, command remunerating prices?—the latter, in particular, when you cannot buy a sirloin in the Quincy Market under a shilling a pound! If, occasionally, produce from the interior competes in our market with that of farms in the vicinity, does it effect more than a change of use, or of the course of cultivation, and does not the increased size of the market draw in the market-wagon from a larger circle? Or, if any temporary depression occurs, are not farms in the outskirts of the counties around Boston, more elevated than the adjacent farms are depressed?

"What would be the position of the farms around Boston to-day, if our railroads and inland marts had no existence, were we to banish the hundred millions of wealth and the one hundred thousand people, which have accumulated in and around Boston since the first movement in railroads, and send them to New York and New Orleans, where they would have been planted, if such movement had not been made?

"Do the one million of tons now moved annually by the railroads out of Boston, doubling once in four years, give no impulse to industry in and around the city? or do these great works of amelioration, which bear industry, the only marketable commodity of the poor man, to the best theatre for its exercise, give no increased value to industry itself?

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