Seventy or eighty years later the irony became a sad and
terrible reality.
Meantime increased attention was given to the improvement of
agriculture, arising, in a great measure, from the widespread panic
which the passion for grazing had caused. Good and patriotic men saw but
one result from it, a dangerous and unwise depopulation, and they called
aloud for remedies against so terrible a calamity. The Author of the
"Answer to the Memorial" quoted above, says, with bitter sarcasm:--"You
are concerned how strange and surprising it would be in foreign parts to
hear that the poor were starving in a rich country.... But why all this
concern of the poor? We want them not as the country is now managed;
they may follow thousands of their leaders, and seek their bread abroad.
Where the plough has no work, one family can do the business of fifty,
and you may send away the other forty-nine. An admirable piece of
husbandry never known or practised by the wisest nations, who
erroneously thought people to be the riches of a country."
This anxious desire to prevent the country from "running into grazing,"
called forth many treatises and pamphlets on the improvement of
agriculture.
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