In attendance upon the county fair at Fonda during the summer of 1890, the writer was struck with the variety and excellence of the live-stock, as well as with the richness of the agricultural products of Montgomery County. This county, with Saratoga and others adjoining, has had marked influence upon the development of the region westward. Not a few of the fine specimens of horses and cattle are descendants of the denizens of the Johnson farm of pre-Revolutionary days. Certainly Johnson was one of the benefactors of the race, who made many blades of grass grow where none grew before. Not the least of his good offices was in prevailing upon the British Government to relax the illiberal laws which prevented the agricultural development of the Mohawk Valley. Much of England’s troubles with her colonies arose from her determination to keep the American part of her domain as a close market for exclusively British products, and thus to compel the Americans to buy only those goods which were manufactured in England or came from British ports. In thus attempting to nip in the bud all flowering of the native genius of the people, she succeeded in hampering, but not wholly repressing, American manufactures. Johnson, as we have seen, was able to get removed the restriction against raising wool. Peter Hasenclever, a Palatine German, who owned land next to Johnson’s royal patent, started an iron foundry, and though himself failing after long and earnest efforts, unable to surmount the numberless difficulties, gave a great stimulus to the development of the iron industry in Northern and Eastern New York. Philip Schuyler set up a flourishing flax-mill. Johnson lived to see the fearful results of the determination of the lucre-loving British lords to force their products upon Americans at all hazards. He regretted these violations not only of human rights in general, but of Englishmen’s rights in particular; though not so outspoken as he might have been. The Americans, while willing to be customers to the greatest nation of shopkeepers, were resolved not to be considered as buyers, and victims of monopoly only. Johnson fortunately died before the covetousness, avarice, and arbitrary thick-headedness of Great Britain, which had forced the slave-trade, hampered commerce, and paralyzed foreign commerce and home manufactures, compelled the colonists to rebuke her pretensions by an appeal to arms. CHAPTER XIII. JOHNSON’S FAMILY; LAST DAYS; EUTHANASIA.