factures, and arts.[1] In 1680 Mahlon Stacy wrote thus to a friend in England, from New Jersey: “We have wanted nothing since we came hither but the company of our good friends and acquaintances; all our people are very well, and in a hopeful way to live much better than they ever did, and not only so, but to provide well for their posterity. I live as well to my content, and in as great plenty as ever I did, and in a far more likely way to make an estate.”[2]
Writers upon political economy, when estimating the sources of the wealth and prosperity of nations, have given comparatively too little attention to the importance of one natural family of the vegetable kingdom, the Gramineæ; yet with reference to ourselves, its cultivation was the foundation of our first successes, of our prodigious growth and augmentation, of our moral and intellectual elevation, and of our influence upon mankind. Food, then, has been made a dominant power, and all creation virtually recognizes the truth of the assertion.
With the relief from anxiety and concern for immediate and temporary requirements, and an improvement in material sources of prosperity, came new wants, spontaneously arising, to a thriving, active, and reasoning people. The need of literary and scientific cultivation was fully understood, and incited to practical endeavors to meet its suggestions. The school and the schoolmaster were early introduced as an institution, and we may advert with interest, not unmingled with pleasure and pride, to the former days when the rustic school-house and the “Log College” were the seats of educa-
- ↑ That enthusiastic writer, Gabriel Thomas, when speaking of the crops of the settlers, informs us that “Their sorts of grain are Wheat, Rye, Pease, Oats, Barley, Buckwheat, Rice, Indian Corn, Indian Pease, and Beans, with great quantities of Hemp and Flax, as also several sorts of eating Roots and Turnips, Potatoes, Carrots, Parsnips, etc., all of which are produced yearly in greater quantities than in England. There are several Husbandmen who sow yearly between seventy and eighty acres of Wheat, each, besides Barley, Oates, Pease, and Beans.”—An Historical and Geographical Account of the Province and Country of Pennsylvania and of West Jersey in America, etc., by Gabriel Thomas, who resided there about fifteen years: London, 1698, p. 10.
- ↑ Smith’s New Jersey, p. 114.
