Remedy for Hard Times

No matter where you turn these days, it seems, signs that we are not out of the woods just yet abound. A friend losing a job he has had for years, a friend making the hard decision to close her yarn shop, budget debates, benefit cuts... the list goes on and on. This "remedy for hard times" was originally published in 1843, almost 170 years ago, but it fitted my mood of today.

We have been asked repeatedly to give our view at length, upon the present state of the country, but we have thought proper, thus far to forbear. We fear that we might be accused of a political bias, foreign to the object of this paper. Still we think it legitimately within the scope of an agricultural journal, to give such views form time to time of the state of the nation as will tend especially to promote the interest of the farmers...

From a letter recently received... we quote a paragraph. Here is the best remedy for hard times that we know of, and if all states will go and do likewise, there will soon be an end of them.

'The people of Kentucky are righting up in pecuniary matters rapidly. The crisis is past. We are buying nothing and selling a good deal, though at low rates. ... Not only have we stopped buying foreign goods, but our people are returning to the old time-honored practice of manufacturing domestics by household industry. The wheel has lain idle for some years, but it is buzzing away now. Hemp, flax, linens, jeans, linseys, woollens, &c., the product of family looms, are substituted for foreign goods.'

American Agriculturalist, New York, May 1843.