the record, about one-fifth of one per cent. I venture to say, that, if these could be traced, four-fifths would be found to have failed in transactions outside of legitimate farming, such as signing notes for others, buying wild-cat patents, assuming obligations too heavy to carry, or attempting to combine with their farming some other business for which they were unfitted.

This certainly does not look like a decline in the agriculture of Massachusetts, and these facts stand in strong contrast to careless individual opinions and observations.

For years has gone out the cry of" Keep the boys on the farm." This ad captandum wail, largely the stock of careless lecturers and newspaper writers, uttered without consideration or sufficient reason, should be greatly modified. To induce one boy to remain on the old homestead — to comfort and assist the father and mother on the down hill of life; to care for the farm, and ultimately to become its owner and the head of a new family, with the social, domestic, business, political and religious responsibilities attending these is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But those who clamor to keep the boys on the farm do not thoughtfully consider the condition of the farmers and their farms, and still less from their narrow stand-point of vision do they consider the laws of nature, under the ordering of a Divine Providence, which compel the dispersion of these families sooner or later.

In the first place, see the situation of the farmer, his land and buildings, as commonly found The average size of farms is now about seventy-five acres ; fifty years ago, about ninety-nine; and the average number of children in a family, about five. Now, to keep three or four boys on the same farm, when they had attained their manhood, with an instinctive and proper desire to be their own masters and to be husbands and fathers, would be unreasonable and impossible. A natural spirit of pride and independence would forbid their long continuing as mere wage-workers. The farm could not be made to support two or three families, even if they attempted the impracticable scheme of a cooperative system. It is not, in the ordinary experience of mankind, possible for two or three families long to dwell in

harmony under the same roof. If two or three grown brothers, with a father and families, ever passed together a continuous, pleasant and profitable life, it is very exceptional.

The attempts formerly made, - now happily rare, — of keeping the boys on the farm by its division among sons, the old father retaining only a life support, have too often resulted in unseemly and distressing quarrels. Quite as impracticable and impossible would it be to divide among two or three sons a farm of a hundred acres, “suitably divided," as an advertisement would read, " into mowing, tillage and pasture, with wood enough for family use, a never-failing well, and running water to the barn." Manifestly, this could not be done; and the only way to keep boys on a farm would be for one to buy an adjacent property, paying what money he had earned since he was one and twenty, mortgaging the farm for the remainder, and getting the old man to sign his notes.

Now, arrangements being made for but one of the boys to stay on the farm, what is to become of the others, and of the sisters, who certainly are worthy of equal consideration, though they seldom receive it? They must go. So much for the practical and personal side of this question.

But there is another matter involved in this "keeping the boys on the farm," broader and more important, in a political sense. History shows that the permanent colonization, settlement and cultivation of new territory is always (with the exception of nomadic races, who move in tribes) accomplished by individual action of the young, hardy, restless and persevering members of the community. The promptings for this migratory tendency are various, never so well illustrated as in the history of our own State and of this whole country: "freedom to worship God;" the search for gold and other precious and useful metals; a desire for more genial skies and a richer soil, which should yield its abundance uncumbered with thorns and thistles, and unwatered by the sweat of the face; and a restless, adventurous desire to penetrate the unknown, and to see and to try something new.

But, were we of the Aryan race not thus possessed of this roving tendency, there would in time have come an

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imperative necessity for a constant migration. among our rugged mountain ranges there are fertile valleys and productive hill-sides, yet a limit would long ago have been found, where the productions of the soil would not have been sufficient to supply the wants of that greatly increased population.

Malthus, a great authority, says: "There is a constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it. It is observed by Dr. Franklin that there is no bound to the prolific nature of plants and animals but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other's means of subsistence. Were the face of the earth vacant of other plants, it might be gradually sown and overspread with one kind only; and, were it empty of other inhabitants, it might in a few ages be replenished from one nation only, — as, for instance, with Englishmen.

"The great law of necessity, which prevents population from increasing in any country beyond the food which it can either produce or purchase, is a law so obvious and evident to our understandings that we cannot for a moment doubt it. The different modes which nature takes to repress a redundant population do not indeed appear to us so certain and regular; but, though we cannot always predict the mode, we may with certainty predict the fact.

"In the northern States of America, where the means of subsistence have been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, and the checks to early marriages fewer than in any of the modern States of Europe, the population has been found to double itself for above a century and a half in less than twenty-five years."

The learned and accomplished superintendent of the Federal census says that the capabilities of increase in population have been exhibited, and on a vast scale, under the most favorable conditions for observation, upon the territory of the United States within the past century; and these capabilities are well understood and susceptible of reduction to at least approximate mathematical statements. In a new community, where land is abundant and fertile, where the occupations of the people are mainly agricultural, where the habits of the people are simple, and the absolute require

ments of the family are few, a population of European stock may increase, decade after decade, at the rate of even thirty per cent in ten years; and it is even possible that, in circumstances exceptionally favorable, an increase of thirtythree or thirty-five per cent, wholly irrespective of immigration, might take place in ten years.

The entire immigration to the United States for thirty years, between 1790 and 1820, was estimated by Dr. Sybert at only about eight thousand annually; while the entire population had increased from four millions to nine and onehalf millions.

Governor Winthrop, speaking of the increase of population to 1640, says, with the rate of increase going on for thirty-five years, the people would have multiplied more than fifteen fold before the beginning of King Philip's war, a doubling in about nine years, which ratio could not last long. The great increase which did come, and by comparison what it would have been, is made more comprehensible by the fact that, prior to King Philip's war, in 1646, forty-four towns had been settled and incorporated; and that before 1765, the date of taking the first colonial census, the number of incorporated towns had increased to one hundred and seventy-five.

This position is strengthened by the fact that, from 1701, when, by the best estimates that could be made, the population of Massachusetts was seventy thousand, to 1776 it had increased 402 per cent. Up to this time there had been but little migration either way; but soon after the war the growing surplus went West.

The redundancy of population in Massachusetts has been constantly reduced by migration to other States and the vast territory west, without which that immense fertile country would for a long time have remained in possession of the roaming buffalo and the untutored Indian. The agricultural portion of our population has in more recent years been somewhat relieved of its redundancy by occupations in local centres, in manufacturing towns or various railways.

The superintendent of the census of 1860 says that about one-third of those born in Massachusetts were then living in other States, and that the old agricultural States may be said to be filled up, so far as the resources adapted to a rural

population in the present condition of agricultural science may be regarded. The conditions of their increase undergo a change upon the general occupation and allotment of their areas. Manufactures and commerce then come in to supply the means of subsistence to an excess of inhabitants beyond what the ordinary cultivation of the soil can sustain.

But people who enter other occupations and pursue other industries must be maintained in food; they cannot live on the products of mechanical, manufacturing or professional labor alone; their actual support must come from the soil, naturally, where they live. And when the land where they have settled fails to furnish that support which they need, they must seek it elsewhere, either by buying it from abroad, -not always practicable, or, as in this case, migrating to broader and more fertile fields, from which to draw the means by which they live.

By the normal increase, without the addition of immigrants, the population of 378,787 in 1790, in doubling at the moderate rate of every thirty years, would have been 757,574 in 1820, 1,515,148 in 1850, and in 1880, 3,110,296,

a population of 386 to every square mile of territory in the State, exceeding in density every other State or country recorded, except Belgium, which has 481 to the square mile, but on over six million acres of cultivated land (five million in the highest state of tilth), while we have but 939,260

acres.

It is, therefore, evident that such a population could never have been maintained on such an acreage of such soil as our State; nor would even the subjugation of the million and a half acres of our " uncultivated land" have afforded relief.

It was only the migration from the farms of able-bodied young men and women, that both held in check our everincreasing population, and planted in other sections of this wide land the germs of great States and a stable government.

While the laws of nature have forbidden any great advance in our agriculture by the ordinary increments of population, counteracted as they have been by constant emigration, we must turn to the remarkably full and accurate statistics of our own census, to judge somewhat by comparison of our standing at the present with that of former years.