profits should be in a farm, whence they could procure their own milk, butter, eggs, vegetables, apples, etc., at first prices. Now, with all the town housekeepers interested in farming, and many of the ex-clerks and shopkeepers compelled to go into it, it is evident that an amount of capital, enterprise, and invention will be attracted to agriculture, such as has no parallel in modern history.
And why should it not be so? Is it not perfectly well understood that all material comfort, happiness, and wealth come first out of the ground? What do all the nations want above everything? Food. The voluptuary finds his most unalloyed enjoyment, the beggar his greatest solace, society its fullest expression of good fellowship, home its most gladsome union, the church its highest act of worship, in eating and drinking. In truth, we are so made that not only we cannot live without some food, but we cannot be well and good-tempered, happy, or comely, without pleasant and abundant food. And yet, instead of trying to get it, the whole world seems mad to make clothes, for these grow cheaper and cheaper,[1] while that grows dearer and dearer. Capitalists expend the strength of their resources in manufactures, and procure iniquitous tariffs to protect them, while poor suffering humanity faints by the wayside for want of "bread to strengthen its heart, wine to make it glad, and oil (or its substitute, butter) to make it a cheerful countenance." Two hundred years ago the manufacturing swarms of Europe did not exist. See what they are now! But we, instead of founding a civilization that will eventually seat every man under his own vine and under his own fig-tree, seem trying to secure for our country, by the year 2000, a town population, the breath of whose miserable life is similarly dependent on the caprices of fashion.
I think no one can read that splendid prose-poem, Guyot's Earth and Man, wherein he characterizes the position and products of the American continents, without feeling that
- ↑ Not that dress as a whole is cheaper, for fashion tries to make up the difference to the poor over-crowded artisans by compelling us all to put much more cloth into our garments, and to have many more of them than formerly.
