into the reckoning. The agricultural journals give us from time to time the most alluring "cash-accounts" of farm-revenue, which make me regard, for a month or two thereafter, every sober-sided farmer I meet as a Rasselas,—"choring" and "teaming it" in a Happy Valley; but shortly I come upon some retired citizen, turned farmer, and active member of a Horticultural Society, slipping about the doors of some "Produce and Commission Store" for his winter's stock of vegetables, butter, and fruits,—and the fact impresses me doubtfully and painfully. It is not often, unfortunately, that printed farm-accounts—most of all, model-farm-accounts—will bear close scrutiny. Sometimes there is delicate reservation of any charge for personal labor or superintendence; sometimes an equally cheerful reticence in respect to any interest upon capital; and in nearly all of them such miniature expression of the cost of labor as gives a very shaky consistency to the exhibit.
Farmers, I am aware, are not much given to figures; but outside "averagers" are; and agricultural writers, if they indulge in figures, ought to show some decent respect for the proprieties of arithmetic. I have before me now the "Bi-Monthly Report of the United States Agricultural Department for January and February, 1864," in the course of which it is gravely asserted, that, in the event of a certain suggested tax on tobacco, "the tobacco-grower would find at the end of the year two hundred and ten percent of his crops unsold." Now I am not familiar with the tobacco-crop, and still less familiar with the Washington schemes of taxation; but whatever may be the exigencies of the former, and whatever may be the enormities of the latter, I find myself utterly unable to measure, even proximately, the misfortune of a tobacco-grower who should find himself stranded with two hundred and ten percent of his crop, after his sales were closed! It is plainly a case involving a pretty large quid pro quo, if it be not a clear one of nisi quid.
Sir John Sinclair, so honorably known in connection with British agriculture, dealt with an estate in Scotland of a hundred thousand acres. He parcelled this out in manageable farms, advanced money to needy tenants, and by his liberality and enterprise gave enormous increase to his rental. He also organized the first valid system for obtaining agricultural statistics through the clergymen of the different parishes in Scotland, thus bringing together a vast amount of valuable information, which was given to the public at intervals between 1790 and 1798. And I notice with interest that the poet Burns was a contributor to one of these volumes,[1] over the signature of "A Peasant," in which he gives account of a farmers' library established in his neighborhood, and adds, in closing,—"A peasant who can read and enjoy such books is certainly a much superior being to his neighbor, who, perhaps, stalks beside his team, very little removed, except in shape, from the brutes he drives."
There is reason to believe that Sir John Sinclair, at one time,—in the heat of the French Revolution,—projected emigration to America; and I find in one of Washington's letters[2] to him the following allusion to the scheme:—"To have such a tenant as Sir John Sinclair (however desirable it might be) is an honor I dare not hope for; and to alienate any part of the fee-simple estate of Mount Vernon is a measure I am not inclined to."
Another British cultivator of this period, whose name is associated with the Mount Vernon estate, was a certain Richard Parkinson of Doncaster, who wrote "The Experienced Farmer," and who not only proposed at one time to manage one of the Washington farms, but did actually sail for America, occupied a place called Orange-Hill, near Baltimore, for a year or more, travelled through the country, making what sale he could of his "Experienced Farmer," and on his
