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more beneficial to the community, and more honorable and profitable to the 

 industrial agents concerned in it. Reason teaches us, that the communities which 

 are the better educated at every point, must be the more wealthy, the more 

 powerful, as well as the more respectable. 



The experience of the civilized world abundantly verifies this conclusion. "We 

 see that the more intelligent the industrial agents, the more ample and valuable 

 the resulting production, throughout the whole economy of society. 



The way is now prepared, to state with more distinctness, the nature, position, 

 and ofEce-work of Agriculture in the social economy. 



In the beginning, man was alone with Nature. Without arts, without capital, 

 without implements, he took his sustenance from the bosom of the earth, as the- 

 common mother of the race. 



Agriculture, in the most restricted signification of the term, implies a departure 

 from this condition. Man was sent into the world with a commission, not merely 

 to share with his fellow animals, the sj^ontaneous productions of nature, but with 

 a charge to search out the physical elements, to determine their capabilities — to 

 make the needful combinations — to bring into action their productive powers, not 

 only to supply the animal wants, and minister to the pleasures of his organic 

 nature, but to render them tributary to his intellectual, moral, and social develop- 

 ment, and his ultimate spiritual elevation and well being. 



In the discharg-e of this great commission, every avocation of man has its work 

 to perform. It is the province of Agriculture to begin the process, by the tilling 

 of the ground, as the term imports — by stimulating and guiding the productive 

 energies of the physical elements to results infinitely transcending, in quantity 

 and quality, the yield of these same elements, unaided by human agency. 



The gross results of Agriculture constitute, what, in the language of economy, 

 is denominated rav) material; and they are so called, precisely because, with 

 almost the single exception of fmits and green vegetables, material products do 

 not come from the hands of the agriculturist, prepared for human use. They are 

 gross and incomplete, the proper material which the Arts are to take, and to 

 mould, and fashion into forms of utihty and beauty, adapted in the finished state, 

 to the satisfaction of the physical wants, and the gratification of the tastes of 

 men. 



In the three great classes of our physical wants, food, clothing and shelter, few 

 indeed are the commodities which come from the hands of the Agriculturist, 

 ready for the consumer I 



Men want not wheat, but bread — therefore the crop, as raw material, must 

 be subjected to the manufacturing processes of the miller and the baker. 



Men want not wool, but clothes — therefore the fleece must undergo successive 

 changes, in the hands of the carder, the spinnor, the weaver, tho fuller, and tha 



