Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 edition. Excerpt:...as a matter now undoubtedly serious. Let none of us withhold our sympathy from the farmer, the cultivator of the soil, in the struggle he has to undergo. His struggle is a struggle of competition with the United States. But I do not fully explain the case when I say the United States. It is not with the entire United States, it is with the western portion of these States--that portion remote from the seaboard; and I wish in the first place, gentlemen, to state to you all a fact of very great interest and importance, as it seems to me, relating to and defining the point at which the competition of the western States of America is most severely felt. I have in my hand a letter received recently from one well-known and honorably known in Scotland--Mr. Lyon Playfair, who has recently been a traveller in the United States and who, as you well know, is as well qualified as any man upon earth for accurate and careful investigation. The point, gentlemen, at which the competition of the western States of America is most severely felt is in the eastern States of America. Whatever be agricultural distress in Scotland, whatever it be, where undoubtedly it is more felt in England, it is greater by much in the eastern States of America. In the States of New England the soil has been to some extent exhausted by careless methods of agriculture, and these, gentlemen, are the greatest of all the enemies with which the farmer has to contend. But the foundation of the statement I make, that the eastern States of America are those that most feel the competition of the West is to be found in facts,--in this fact above all, not only they are not in America, as we are here, talking about the shortness of the annual returns and in some places having much said on the...