Modern Agriculture [pp. 660-667]

MODERN AGRICULTURE.
All true! but strange doctrine from the free-trader, Jean
Baptiste Say. We of the South until recently have neglected all
interests but that of agriculture, and thereby exhausted our
lands and impoverished our country. Of late years a strong
reaction has taken place: cities and towns are arising and
flourishing, manufactures springing into existence, education
better attended to, our people kept at home by the growing attractions of home, more of our crops consumed at home, and
manures imported to restore the loss of fertility in our soil, occasioned by an unavoidable export of a large agricultural surplus.
The BALANCE OF MANURE is the true balance of Trade, and
the great secret of national growth, wealth, prosperity, and
strength! State governments are now active in advancing
all industrial interests. State protection is the order of the
day. In this new departure which the South has taken, this
REvIEw has ably and laboriously led the way. Federal protection, a protective tariff, would but rivet our chains, and
continue our dependence. We must take care of ourselves.
Motives stronger than national wealth now combine to urge
the South forward in her new policy. Honor and independence require that she should produce, or be capable at a
moment's warning to produce, within herself, all the comforts
and necessaries of life. Assailed by England and the North,
she should be prepared in an emergency to live without trade
with either. The reader will find the doctrines which we advocate better expressed by our author than by anything we
can add. His reasoning is clear, close, and consecutive. His
style lucid, concise, nervous, fervid, and eloquent. In truth,
as an author and philosopher, he is the equal of any man of
the age. At page 143, he writes:
"In the produce of his fields, the farmer sells in reality his lands; he sells in
his crops certain elements of the atmosphere that are constantly being replaced
from that inexorable store, and certain constituents of the soil that are his property, and which have served to form out of the atmospheric elements the body
of the plant, of which they themselves constitute component parts. In altogether
alienating the crops of his fields, he deprives the land of the conditions for their
reproduction. A system of farming, based upon such principles, justly deserves
to be branded as a system of spoliation. Had all the constituents of the soil,
carried off from the field in the products sold, been, year after year, or rotation
after rotation, returned to the soil, the latter would have preserved its fertility to
the fullest extent; the grain of the farmer would indeed have been reduced by
the repurchase of the alienated constituents of the soil, but it would thereby
have been rendered permanent.
"The constituents of the soil are the farmer's capital; the elements of food
supplied by the atmosphere, the interest of this capital; by means of the former
he produces the latter. By selling the produce of his farm he alienates a por
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