536 



that kind that will best afford the essential degree of manual exercise, 

 and best accord with his taste and capacity. 



Can a better choice be made than to cultivate the earth — to adopt 

 the mode of life, the exercise of mind and muscle, and the general 

 round of business, incident to the conduct of a farm and the practice of 

 agriculture ? As farmers, you have chosen that employment that con- 

 duces by the legitimate pursuit, more to perfect the m^n, to school the 

 animal to proper subordination to the divinity of his higher nature, 

 than any other profession or calling; and therefore you have chosen 

 ■wisely. You may claim for your vocation a high antiquity ; and you 

 may claim for it a holy mission, that of feeding the hungry, and cloth- 

 ing the naked. To say that it is useful — that it is indispensable — that 

 were the tillage of the earth to be abandoned, society must relapse into 

 barbarism, adopt the wandering life of the savage, and still suffer from 

 inevitable famine, would be to utter a truism that none can doubt. 

 Such an event is not to be anticipated, until man shall cease to eat 

 bread, or need that wherewithal to be clothed. Let him who doubts 

 the utility of agriculture, live independently of it if he can. 



The moral tendency, the effect of country life, of seclusion from the 

 busy scenes of trade, the din and bustle of commercial pursuits, and 

 the sordidness they engender, and lastly, but not least, separation from 

 the blandishments of fashionable livmg, are worthy of particular 

 remark. 



Agriculture is peculiarly a country pursuit, or in the more refined 

 phraseology of the moderns, a rural occupation, and requires steady 

 and patient industry, in comparative solitude in the rural districts. 

 By this change of terms, the votary of agriculture secures a business 

 that is not so country-like as that of the farmer formerly, but still 

 so far removed from the contagion of city civilization, that he may 

 happily escape, if he will, the vices and temptations that abound ia 

 populous places. During the season of field labor, rising before the 

 dawn, he v/itnesses the sublime spectacle, only imagined by the den- 

 izens of a city, of night fading into day, on the approach of the 

 great source of light and heat. But so accustomed is he to all the visi- 

 ble and interesting phenomena of nature, that he may be surprised to 

 hear that to witness a sunrise is one of his peculiar felicities, or that so 

 trifling a thing as a fragile flower, the innocence of the Iamb, the pa- 



J 



