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this happy result is verified in the case of the farmer. In times past, tlie 

 laborer, the tiller, the worker has been nothing but a miserable self eveiy- 

 ■where, as he is now in a majority of civilized countries. It has been some- 

 where pungently remarked in regard to the agriculture of Great Britain, that 

 the only part of the agriculture of that proud empire which had exhibited no 

 improvement during the last two centuries, was the laboi'er himself who did 

 the work. This is indeed a melancholy reflection, but too true. The tlite of 

 all civilized Europe have been the titled ari.stocracy, the officials, the army, na- 

 vy, and more recently, merchants and trading classes. The farm laborer has 

 been laboring, from age to age, even without hope for any higher respecta- 

 bility for his children. He could not acquire a spot which he could call his 

 own, a hearth-stone around which he could gather the charms and delights 

 of home. He had no Penates, like the ancient Roman, no household Gods. 

 In England to-day the farmer is generally the lessee of large tracts, and as 

 compared with the actual laborer, an aristocrat in a small way. Between the 

 exactions of farmer, landlord, and tax gatherer, little or nothing is left to the 

 toiler. It follows that the tiller of the soil is doomed to hopeless exertion, to 

 ignorance, to want, to extortion, and disease, with hardly a chance to escape 

 from associations calculated to render him coarse, if not brutal, ignorant, if 

 not besotted. Because looking over the surface of mankind, history tells 

 this lamentable, this unholy, this terrific tale, therefore the short sighted 

 generality is eagerly seized, that by a law as inflexible as a law of nature, 

 such must be the eternal fate of the tillers of the soil, including yourselves. 

 One half century will afford a different demonstration. Enterprises like 

 yours, from the giant State Fair of New York to the humblest county Fair, 

 are promoting it. The emigrant westward of to-day carries a more cultivated 

 brain and as strong an arm as his predecessor. The improvements of one 

 longitude are borne rapidly to another by improved modes of locomotion, 

 and by the electric spread of thought and intelligence. If there never was a 

 great, refined, intellectual rural population, there will and must be one in our 

 land. Woe be to this nation if there is not. We live on the edge of the val- 

 ley of the Mississippi. That valley must be the centre of the civilization of 

 this hemisphere. The ideas and institutions which there rule must give 

 character to and rule the vast republic. These ideas and this character, which 

 will impress and control the body politic, must be those of a great rural pop- 

 ulation. In this as in all countries, by necessity, the agriculturists must be 

 a majority over all others. Ideas, ideas, now rule the world. The army of 

 the Czar, the purse of the Rothschilds, may shape affairs of the world to -day. 

 They may do it for next year or the next forty years, but the apparently im- 

 pregnable edifices of power erected upon them, are daily undermined by 

 ideas, by opinion. In our country the power of accumulated wealth, the 

 tyranny of corporations, the power of associated talent, conspiracies tacit or 

 open of great parties or sects, political or religious, against the weal of the 

 whole, are all powerless before the sway of ideas. It becomes then every 

 man devoted to agriculture to be responsible that his children and successors, 

 the posterity of himself and his neighbors, shall be enlightened. It becomes 



