Life in the Clearings versus the BushMoodie, Susanna
History
Life in the Clearings versus the Bush
Moodie, Susanna
Frontier and pioneer life -- Ontario; Moodie, Susannah, 1803-1885; Ontario -- Description and travel
Surely it is folly for any one to despair of the future, while the
providence of God superintends the affairs of the universe. Is it not
sinful to doubt the power of that Being, who fed a vast multitude from a
few loaves and small fishes? Is His arm shortened, that he can no longer
produce those articles that are indispensable and necessary for the
health and comfort of the creatures dependent upon his bounty? What
millions have been fed by the introduction of the potato plant--that
wild, half-poisonous native of the Chilian mountains! When first
exhibited as a curiousity by Sir Walter Raleigh, who could have imagined
the astonishing results,--not only in feeding the multitudes that for
several ages in Ireland it has fed, but that the very blight upon it,
by stopping an easy mode of obtaining food, should be the instrument in
the hands of the great Father to induce these impoverished, starving
children of an unhappy country, to remove to lands where honest toil
would be amply remunerated, and produce greater blessings for them than
the precarious support afforded by an esculent root? We have faith,
unbounded faith, in the benevolent care of the Universal Father,--faith
in the fertility of the earth, and her capabilities of supporting to the
end of time her numerous offspring.
The over-population of old settled countries may appear to a casual
thinker a dreadful calamity; and yet it is but the natural means
employed by Providence to force the poorer classes, by the strong law of
necessity, to emigrate and spread themselves over the earth, in order to
bring into cultivation and usefulness its waste places. When the world
can no longer maintain its inhabitants, it will be struck out of being
by the fiat of Him who called it into existence.
Nothing has contributed more to the rapid advance of the province than
the institution of the Agricultural Society, and from it we are already
reaping the most beneficial results. It has stirred up a spirit of
emulation in a large class of people, who were very supine in their
method of cultivating their lands; who, instead of improving them, and
making them produce not only the largest quantity of grain, but that of
the best quality, were quite contented if they reaped enough from their
slovenly farming to supply the wants of their family, of a very inferior
sort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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