Vol. I. Philadelphia, Eighth Month, 1820. No. 8.
There is nothing in which the honourablefame and steady prosperityof our country, and the best interestsof its inhabitants, are more deeply involved,than in the promotion ofagriculture. With one hundred andtwenty millions of acres of cleared,or natural, strong, unwooded land,and a population computed at ninemillions of persons, we have moresoil already prepared for plantations,farms and grazing, in proportion toour numbers, than any other civilizedpeople; and our capacities to add toour quantity of cleared or unwoodedland, extend to ten times the numberof acres. From the productions ofthese lands have our former happinessand wealth arisen, and from thecommerce and fabrication of theseproductions, have our foreign and domestictrade, and all our home manufactures,worth above two hundredmillions of dollars, sprung up. Themerchants and manufacturers actuallyhold so real and great a competitionfor the natural and agricultural productionsof the land, that none ofthese productions, capable of manufacture,were exported even in thelast year, except cotton, in the manufactureof which we had made verygreat progress, in 1810; even withoutthe double and war duties, orthose existing at this time. Theywere supposed to be worth 15,000,000of dollars in that year. The presentcrisis, when all nations are revisingand improving their systems of agriculture,commerce and manufactures,appears to be a fit season for increasedattention, consideration and exertionon our part; and first in the cultureof the soil. It is proposed, as asuitable object for such a work asThe Rural Magazine, to make someof those exertions in relation to agricultureand the connected subjects,which are often demanded by thosestrong tides in human life, which aredispensed to us in the course of divineProvidence. Pennsylvania, and thefive other states which are contiguousto her, making six in their wholenumber, contain about one hundredand forty millions of acres of land inthe most temperate and genial farmingclimates of our country. Thesouthern parts of that noble farmingdistrict even favours the cotton, thevine and the fig tree; and every speciesof production, requiring the toneof the northern part of the temperatezone for its growth or the fabrication[282]of those productions, is adapted to thehigher latitudes of that region of ourcountry. The best culture of theeastern states is comprehended in theproper farming of that district. Theeffectual bearing of the productionsof the south upon the profits of thefarming of the middle, northern andeastern states, will always render theactual or new culture of our greatsouthern district of sugar, rice, indigo,cotton and grape vines, deeplyimportant us; because the cultivationof those and other productions,adapted to their climates, will preventtheir attention, as principal objects,to those things which must always beproduced by our cattle, grass, apple,vegetable and grain farms. The ciderand apple brandy, for example,of the county of Morris, in New Jersey,which far exceeds the generalbelief, the superfine flour of the whitewheat country of this middle district,and the fabrications of the dairy ofthe eastern states, sustain no interferenceat home or abroad, from theproductions of th