The wise public men of that day knew how urgent was the need of better methods in farming. Fifteen years before, George Washington had said, "I know of no pursuit in which more real and important service can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture." But it was generally believed that the task was hopeless; and any effort to encourage inventors had hitherto been a failure. An English society, for instance, had offered a prize of one hundred and fifty dollars for a better method of reaping grain, and the only answer it received was from a traveller who had seen the Belgians reaping with a two-foot scythe and a cane; the cane was used to push the grain back before it was cut, so that more grain could be cut at a blow. As to whether or not he received the prize for this discovery is not recorded. The city of New York in 1809 was not larger than the Des Moines of to-day, and not nearly so well built and prosperous. Two miles to the north of it, through swamps and forests, lay the clearing that is now known as Herald Square. There was no street railway, nor cooking range, nor petroleum, nor savings bank, nor friction match, nor steel plow, neither in New York nor anywhere else. And the one pride and boast of the city was Fulton's new steamboat, the _Clermont_, which could waddle to Albany and back, if all went well, in three days or possibly four. As for social conditions, they were so hopelessly bad that few had the heart to improve them. The house that we call a "slum tenement" to-day would have made an average American hotel in 1809. Rudeness and rowdyism were the rule. Drunkenness was as common, and as little considered, as smoking is at the present time; there was no organized opposition to it of any kind, except one little temperance society at Saratoga. There were no sewers, and much of the water was drawn from putrid wells. Many faces were pitted with small-pox. Cholera and yellow jack or strange hunger-fevers cut wide swaths of death again and again among the helpless people. There was no science, of course, and no sanitation, and no medical knowledge except a medley of drastic measures which were apt to be as dangerous as the disease. The desperate struggle to survive appears to have been so intense that there was little or no social sympathy. There was very little pity for the pauper,--he was auctioned off to be half starved by the lowest bidder; and for the criminal there was no feeling except the utmost repulsion and abhorrence. It was found, for instance, in 1809, that in the jail in New York there were seventy-two women, white and black, in one chairless, bedless room, all kept in order by a keeper with a whip, and fed like cattle from a tub of mush, some eating with spoons and some with cups and some with their unwashed hands. And the men's room of that jail, says this report, "is worse than the women's."