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getting back, as soon as possible, the hay crop which was formerly produced.

The statistics of this State, gentlemen, as furnished by the census which was taken in 1870, are also somewhat discouraging. We see by these that in the rural portions of the State, in the older portions of the State, there has been a decrease, rather than an increase, in the population. It is particularly unfortunate that we have not been able, during the last decade, to increase our population; but such is the fact.

It may not be improper for us to consider, briefly, some of the causes which have led to this result. It is very well understood that the business which you have met to consider, the agriculture of this State, lies at the very foundation of all other business, and at the foundation of the prosperity of the State. No other business can succeed well unless agriculture succeeds. It is, nevertheless, true, that the agricultural interest is, to some extent, dependent upon the other interests of the State. I mean by this, that every professional man, every man who builds a ship, every man who goes out fishing from our coast, every mechanic, every operative in our factories, every man who works upon our granite and in our slate quarries, and in the quarrying and burning of our lime, every one of them requires what the farmer produces, and the more we have of those interests, the larger number of persons there are employed in those occupations, the greater will be the benefit to the agriculture of the State. We are not able to compete in the raising of breadstuffs with the grain-growing States of the West, but there are some things that we can raise, and in which we can compete with any other portion of the country. We can raise potatoes here as well as anywhere, and the potato сгор that we export now is one of our largest sources of income, and a very important crop with us. There is another thing we can do. As you establish manufactures, or any industry, it makes no difference what, anywhere in the State, that requires operatives, that requires men and women to carry it on, you have there a market for such of the surplus of the garden and the farm as cannot be brought from abroad. In respect to these products, we have no other part of the world to compete with us. It appears to me, therefore, that in the older farming portions of this State, nothing will tell more favorably upon the agricultural interest of those communities than the establishment of other industries in our midst. Everybody knows that in the immediate

vicinity of some of our manufacturing towns, the price of farms has increased more than three hundred per cent. within the last fifteen or twenty years, in consequence of the establishment of this other business. There are a good many farmers here who know that, living as they do in the immediate vicinity of some of these mauufacturing establishments, they are enabled to get a large surplus from their farms, for which they can obtain ready cash in these places, which before the establishment of these factories, was almost valueless. Hence it appears that all these interests depend upon each other; that if you increase the manufacturing interest of the State, you increase the farming interest of the State, and increase the profits of the farmer. If you increase our shipbuilding, if you increase the work upon our quarries, if you increase the amount of fishing operations in the State, in short, if you increase any of the different industrial avocations of life, you to a certain extent, at least, improve the agricultural interest of the State.

It is, perhaps, somewhat unfortunate that we have not, in the past, been able to retain a larger proportion of the men we have raised in our own State. It is somewhat unfortunate, it would seem to us now, that so large a number of the leading men of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and the Western States, in the professions, in trade, and in the mechanical pursuits, are men who were raised in Maine, and who left this State, because, as they thought, we had not sufficient room for them here; men who left Maine because in their judgment there was not enough for them to do in Maine; men who left Maine, undoubtedly, some of them, because of a mistaken policy on the part of the State, in consequence of which we have not been able to create more business that should keep our young men at home. It is a fact, that you may go into almost any of our Western States, and you will find that a large number of the leading mercantile and professional men,- -a large number of the men who are holding, at the present time, offices of trust and of profit, are men who were educated in Maine, and who went out from us. It has become a serious question how we are to retain, in the future, such a portion of this talent as we need. It seems hardly right that we should furnish so large a portion of the mental and physical forces that have built up other States and made them prosperous and powerful. It seems unfortunate that we have not kept a larger portion of these elements at home. How shall we do it? I

have an idea that the declaration made some time since, which has grown into a law, so to speak, that "Westward the course of Empire takes its way," has of itself, by the very force which to a certain extent lay in that declaration, had a tendency to take a "great many men away. We have accepted it as a matter of course that empire must take its way towards the West. Now, to a certain extent, that is true; to a certain extent it is proper. The history of our country shows that this has been the case, and it undoubtedly will be so, to a certain extent, in the future; but if, the young men of this State could understand fully the resources we have, if they could understand the hidden treasures waiting to be developed within the borders of their own State, there would not be so strong a tendency to go; and I believe that this exodus from our State grows more out of the fact that we have failed to appreciate our own resources, and to employ the means to make them contribute to our prosperity, than anything else.

Now, what is the State of Maine? I know it is regarded by a great many as a State lying away out in the extreme northeast of the country, a frozen region, very near "the jumping-off place," where not much can be raised; and good for little except to raise men and women. We have proved that our State is good for that, by the men and women we have sent into other parts of the country. But I have an idea, that when we take all its elements into consideration, we shall find that Maine, even, is, to some extent, a favored land. We are located on the borders of a rich, although a foreign country. This State has become the thoroughfare through which a large amount of business between England and the Provinces, north and south, from Portland to Montreal, is being done. It is soon to become the highway through which is to pass a large amount of travel, and some of the freight, at least, between Europe and the western portion of this continent. The road just completed through this State, extending now to St. John, and soon to go as far as Halifax, must become a great thoroughfare, through which will flow a very large part of the travel between the western part of this country and Europe. It cannot possibly be otherwise.

In our sea-coast, we have very great advantages. Every one who has traced the map, or who has gone along our borders, must have been struck with the fact that our sea-coast makes deep indentations, in some places our harbors penetrating almost to the

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very heart of the State,-and then passing on in its winding way, making a sea-coast of somewhere between two and three thousand miles on the border of the State of Maine. We have in this seacoast immense opportunities. Our bays are sufficient to float all the navies and all the commerce of the world. It gives us facili ties for ship-building, so far as the mere opportunities of getting to the ocean are concerned, that cannot be rivalled by any other State in the Union. For the purpose of the fisheries, which is a very important interest with us and with other parts of New England, it certainly has advantages in many respects 'superior to any others. We have in what has been denominated our "rock-bound coast," we have in our very granite, where nothing can be made to grow, we have upon our hills and upon our shores, mines of immense wealth. I have made some inquiry into this matter, and as near as I can learn, within the last year, we have dug out of those quarries of granite about two and a half millions of dollars; and this business is increasing rapidly. We are sending it to almost all parts of the country, clear round to New Orleans and up the Mississippi river as far as St. Louis. The Superintendent told me a short time since that he was hoping they would be able to furnish the stone for the new public buildings to be built in Chicago, in place of those that have been burned down. Such is the reputation of Maine granite abroad, that he thought the persous having control of the matter would conclude that they could afford to transport it all the way from Maine to Chicago, rather than to use stone of an inferior quality, that could be obtained nearer home. Something like three thousand men are now engaged in this branch of industry in this State.

The very coldness of our climate, which in the opinion of so many is objectionable, produces for us a large revenue, in the ice which is accumulated in our rivers and lakes. On the Kennebec river between Gardiner and Riclimond, a very short space comparatively, I cannot tell just how long, -the crop of ice in 1869, '70, amounted to about a million dollars. Quite a large income; nothing destroyed, nothing lost; just so much clear gain from the labor of our people.

Then we have other sources of profit. Our slate quarries are becoming of great consequence. They are being opened now to an extent which shows that the supply is inexhaustible, and they are being worked to great advantage. Our railroads are being

extended into the vicinity of those quarries, and the business increases to such an extent that we may reasonably expect in the future to reap a very large revenue from it.

Then, again, when we consider our facilities for manufacturing, we have no hesitation in saying that there is no State in the Union which has facilities equal to our own.. Our water-power is unlimited, and in centuries on centuries, under the most favorable circumstances, we could not be expected to use it all. Some of our rivers have their rise in localities fifteen hundred feet above the sea, making a descent of fifteen hundred feet from the place where they rise to the place where they empty into the ocean, furnishing opportunities for the establishment of factories all along. The average descent of our rivers from the place where they take their rise in this State is something more than six hundred feet. You see there is a very great fall.

But we have something more than this. Only about one-third of the area of this State is now cultivated, or included in what are denominated towns. About two-thirds, or a little more than twenty thousand square miles, are to-day in forest. About fifteen thousand square miles of that are in the northern and northeastern portion of the State, where the hand of cultivation has never gone. In those forests fall our heavy and deep snows, which, melting all along from early spring to June and July, furnish a continuous flow of water, even in the dryest seasons of the year, to keep up the flow of those rivers and supply the water-power on their

courses.

We have still other advantages. Most of the rivers, of any considerable importance in this State, take their rise in some large lake or other large reservoir, which serve to retain the waters until they may be needed in the drouths which may occur in the summer. At a small expense, dams can be raised that will keep back all the water that we may need to reserve, so that, in the dryest season of the year, the wheels will continue to run. We have, then, an important advantage in this respect.

What shall we say of the agricultural advantages of our State? It is well known that, although they are not equal to those of some other States, yet, in many respects, they will not suffer by comparison with many of the States that have outstripped us in agricultural wealth. In the valley of the Saco, of the Androscoggin, on the Kennebec and Sandy rivers, and on the Aroostook and St. John, we have some land about as good as can be found

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