ously estimated at from three hundred and fifty to five hundred millions of dollars, equal to one-half or two-thirds of the whole expenditures upon such works in this country, the fact stares us fully in the face. Are our roads in a similar category? Is the vice from which the former have suffered inherent in the system, or peculiar to one country?" Well has this question been put, and well should it be answered. What most surprises me is, that the question seems to be regarded entirely as one between those personally identified with the railways. Whilst a few individuals, compared with the masses, have been made the victims of fraud, and a few more have been engaged in perpetrating it, these two classes have received the entire sympathies and execrations of these journalists. The people seem never to have been thought of. The great question of DIVIDENDS ON FICTION, drawn from productive industry, seems to have been entirely overlooked. They have avoided the real question in political economy, and only taken the division of plunder into the account. When will the statesman and political economist sufficiently learn that THERE IS ALWAYS A PEOPLE?

The question here naturally arises, "Are we yet prepared for the adoption of the State system in Texas?" My answer to this question would be, "No." Not, however, from the want of resources, nor want of population, nor from incapacity to make and establish an adequate basis for public credit. Our people, as a whole, have not as yet sufficiently educated themselves on the subject of internal improvements. They are barely and but temporarily fortified against the repetition of that delusion which has swept over the land, and left our politicians looking very queer. The State system involves and requires the highest and purest principles of statesmanship known to humanity. It requires the combination of intelligence, good sense, and patriotism, all directed carefully to the subject. The man who has never made the profession of law his study is just as competent to practice law as the man is fitted to speak or act on the subject of internal improvements who has never made that his study; not that it requires the same length of time to master the one as the other, for the candid, careful, and ingenuous mind will in a little time, with proper assistance, be enabled to comprehend clearly the whole principles and details of both the State and corporate systems. There is more accurate knowledge now afloat in Texas on this subject than in any State in the Union, in proportion to our population. And why is it? The teachings of the great teachers on this subject, but who are now in their graves, have been perseveringly promulgated within

the last three years. Awkward as may have been the delineations, they have set our citizens to thinking, investigating, and analyzing, until now a large class see the way clear in favor of the State system. They now discover its justice and power, in comparison with which the corporate system, with its speculating foundation and dirty tricks, appears contemptible. They are beginning to have a very proper aversion to the payment of DIVIDENDS ON FICTION. We have barely entered, however, on the threshhold of profitable agitation and discussion. As soon as sound internal improvement education can be carried far enough will our citizens be prepared to adopt the State system with success. The best intellects in the State, or in the United States, however, are incompetent to comprehend the subject by intuition. They must investigate. If they investigate with an eye steady to the interests of the State, they will have no difficulty. If the feeling of narrow-minded locality comes uppermost, it will unfit them for both reason and proper action.

But again can we stand where we are? Distressed by sacrifices, could our citizens be kept from making the effort to relieve themselves from their present condition? They all agree that railroads is the only basis of relief, therefore we are compelled into the adoption of some system, whether it be a true or false one, a wise and powerful or a vitiated and weak one. Any one who has looked over the State, and duly reflected on the subject, ought to know that locality has no strength sufficient to accommodate itself. If we cannot agree upon a reasonable schedule of roads, both as to amount and location, if we cannot agree upon a financial basis and system in connexion under which to construct them, divested of all false political economy, we shall remain powerless, as heretofore, to do anything. We will be obliged to adopt a system that shall be wisely and judiciously planned, perfected, and secured against failure, one that shall command confidence at home and respectability abroad, or we cannot command credit or means to carry it out. If any other is attempted, the present advocates of the State system, I trust, will be the first to discover its defects and to oppose it. Nothing but the most perfect statesmanship will answer the purpose, and our whole people should be made to know it and to understand it; that sections may set the example to sections to act sensibly and rationally. We have no chance for relief upon any other basis. We have resources capable of being multiplied by good management, sufficient to make the State and every part of it well off; but if we continue to act without concert and system, we shall remain nearly where we are ten years hence. LORENZO SHERWOOD.

THE PROVINCE OF EDUCATION.

Wm. Gilmore Simms, than whom the south has no son more distinguished in literature and scholarship, nor wider known for authorship throughout the republic, in an address delivered at Spartanburg, South Carolina, thus discourses of education. The elevation of Mr. Simms by his native State to any high post of honor and responsibility would be hailed by scholars everywhere as a well-earned tribute to talent and worth, like the appointment of Mr. Irving to Spain, or that of Mr. Bancroft to England.

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I have, my friends, just returned from a visit to your own glorious mountain region of the Apalachian, and this journey, by the way, must furnish my apology for the shortcomings of this oration, must plead to you for its imperfections, as it must certainly fail equally to meet your expectations and my own standard. And, as I gazed, a mighty image arose before my soul's vision, and I beheld the mysterious author, Nature herself, throned in her tangled sovereignty of waste-wild torrents roaring around her; great winds swaying her solemn forests into music, the tumults of which, while they raised the choir of storm into sublimity, did not impair its awful symphonies. These were her voices-voices of moaning and complaint; for in all her grandeur there was gloom, and the desolation of her State rendered valueless all her profligate wilderness of wealth. Her voices of cataract and storm were calling upon art for succor and deliverance. She was imploring man-he to whom all her empire was decreed-to come to her assistance. alone could open the pathways to her empire and make it fruitful. She needed his pioneer to trace out the avenue to her grand abodes; to grade the summits; to span the gulfs with his arches; to render safe the march along her stupendous precipices; she needed his industry to lay bare the tangled wastes of valley beneath her heights, and to clothe their bosoms in yellow harvests, ripening in a generous sun, for the scythe of autumn. She demanded of him the art which should strew her highway with flowers; which should make her crags blossom with the rose; which should crown her ledges with noble architecture; which should raise her statues of living marble out of the massed stolidity of her now cold and silent rocks. Melancholy in her glorious solitude, gloomy in all her grandeur. Nature was thus crying out everywhere for the succor and help of man-for that culture of art which should soothe with the sweets of beauty her dark, and terrible, and sterile aspects.

And thus, in the same sterile, irregular, tangled condition-a wild sovereignty of gloom and thicket-the great soul of humanity cries aloud to education for her rescue.

AGRICULTURAL AND HORTICULTURAL JOURNAL.

AGRICULTURE IN ALL AGES.

No. I.*

I shall in the present article limit myself to a brief historical sketch of agriculture, which became one of the sustaining arts of life as soon as man was ordained to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. In the garden of Eden, whose fertile soil and genial clime appear to have combined in maturing a continued variety and unfailing succession of vegetable sustenance, agricultural operations were unknown; for that which came spontaneously to perfection required no assistance from human ingenuity; and where there is no deficiency there can be no inducement to strive for improvement. That period of perfection was but transitory; and the Deity that had placed man in the garden "to dress it and keep it," eventually drove him thence "to till the earth from whence he was taken.' (Gen. ii. 15; iii. 23.)

From that time to the present, agriculture has been an improving art; and there is no reason to doubt but that it will go on advancing as long as mankind continues to increase.

Man, in his greatest state of ignorance, is always found dependent for subsistence upon the produce of the chase; but, as population increases, recourse must be had to other sources of food. And we find in the shepherd's life of the early ages, the first step to agricultural art, the domestication of animals, which it was found to be more convenient to have constantly at hand, rather than to have to seek precariously at the very time they were required. As the increase of population still went on, and the flocks and the herds had proportionately to be enlarged, one favorite spot would be found too small for the subsistence of the whole; and, as in the case of Abraham and Lot, they would have to separate and find pasturage in different districts. This separation into tribes could not proceed beyond a certain extent; and when the land was fully occupied, recourse would by necessity be had to means of increasing the produce of given surfaces of soil instead of enlarging their extent. With Abraham and Isaac it is very evident that wheat and the other fruits of the carth were the rare and choice things of their country; but when such nations once learned, as they might from the example of Egypt, the resource such products were in periods of famine, arising from mortalities among their cattle, they would soon pursue their interests by cultivating them. This completed, the acquirement of property in land for the space not only long occupied, but upon which the occupier had bestowed his labor, built his habitation, and had enclosed from injury by vagrant animals, would be acknowledged to be his without any one stopping to inquire what right he had to make the enclosure.

When once thus located, experience and observation would soon teach the employment of manures, irrigation, times of sowing, and other necessary operations; and every generation would be wiser in the art than that which preceded it. This especially has occurred in these more northern climates, where art and industry has to compensate for a deficiency of natural advantages. "Enlarging numbers,' observes Mr. Sharon Turner, "only magnify the effect; for mankind seem to thrive and civilize in proportion as they multiply; and, by a recurrent action, to multiply again in proportion as they civilize and prosper.' In this manner improved modes of cultivation, the introduction of new species, and of more fruitful varieties of agricultural produce, have universally kept pace with an increasing population. This, resting upon a basis of facts, vindicates the wisdom of Provi * From Johnson's Farmers' Encyclopædia.

dence, and refutes Mr. Malthus's superficial theory of over-production. The agricultural produce of England has gradually increased from the insignificant amount that was its value in the time of the Roman invasion, to the enormous annual return of £200,000,000; and it is very certain that in this country, and much more in other parts of the world, the produce is a mere fraction of what the total soil is capable of returning.

Agriculture is the art of obtaining from the earth food for the sustenance of man and his domestic animals; and the perfection of the art is to obtain the greatest possible produce at the smallest possible expense. Upon the importance of the art, it is needless, therefore, to insist; for by it every country is enabled to support in comfort an abundant population. On this its strength as a nation depends; and by it its independence is secured. An agricultural country has within itself the necessaries and comforts of life; and, to defend these, there will never be wanting a host of patriot soldiers.

Of the pleasure attending the judicious cultivation of the soil, we have the evidence of facts. The villa farms sprinkled throughout our happy land, the establishments of Holkham, Woburn, &c., would never have been formed if the occupation connected with them was not delightful. We have an unexceptionable witness to the same fact in the late Mr. Roscoe, the elegant, talented author of the Lives of Lorenzo de Medici and of Leo the Tenth. Mr. Roscoe was the son of an extensive potato grower, near Liverpool. In the cultivation of that and other farm produce, he had been an active laborer; and he who thus had enjoyed the delights that spring from literary pursuits, and from the cultivation of the soil, has left this recorded opinion: "If I was asked whom I consider to be the happiest of the human race, I should answer, those who cultivate the earth by their own hands."

We have but little information to guide us as to the country in which man first cultivated the soil; nor of that in which he first settled after the deluge. Thus much, however, is certain, that we have the earliest authentic account of the state of agriculture as it existed among the Egyptians and their bond-servants, the Israelites. From the former, probably the Greeks were descended. The Romans, at a later period, were a colony from Greece; and from the Romans the other countries of Europe derived their earliest marked improvement in the arts. Our brief history of the progress of agriculture, then, will be divided into1. The agriculture of the Egyptians and other eastern nations; 2. The agriculture of the Greeks; 3. The agriculture of the Romans; 4. The agriculture of the Britons, including a cursory notice of its present state among the chief nations of Europe.

I. THE AGRICULTURE OF THE EGYPTIANS, ISRAELITES, AND OTHER EARLY EASTERN NATIONS.-Every family of these primitive nations had its appointed district for pasturage, if it pursued a pastoral life; or its allotted enclosure, if it was occupied by tilling the earth. There was no distinction in this respect between the monarch and his people: each had a certain space of land from which he and his family were to derive their subsistence.

The Egyptians, as well as the Israelites, were flock-masters. The latter were particularly so; and, as Joseph's brethren said to Pharoah, "their trade was about cattle from their youth. (Gen. xlvi, 34.) When, therefore, they came into Egypt, they desired the low-lying land of Goshen, as producing the most perennial of pasture. (Gen. xlvii, 4.) It is true that the same authority says, "Every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians; but this was because, about a century before the arrival of Joseph among them, a tribe of Cushite shepherds from Arabia had conquered their nation, and held them in slavery; till, after a sanguinary contest of thirty years, they regained their liberty, about twenty-seven years before Joseph was promoted by Pharoah. That the Egyptians were flockmasters is certain, from many parts of the Scriptures. Thus, when Pharoah gave permission to the Israelites to dwell in Goshen, he added, as he spoke to Joseph, "And if thou knowest any men of activity among them, then make them rulers over my cattle," (Gen. xlvii, 6;) and when the murrain came into Egypt, it was upon their horses, asses, camels, oxen, and sheep. (Exod. ix, 3.)

The attention and care necessary to be paid to their domestic animals were evidently well known and attended to; for, when they proposed to settle in a land, their first thought was to build "sheepfolds for their cattle." (Numb. xxxii, 16.) They had stalls for their oxen, (Hab. iii, 17,) and for all their beasts. Thus King Hezekiah is said to have made "stalls for all manner of beasts, and cotes for