THIRD DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. •">•">.'! 



than bleaching linen and painting pictures with its swift pencil of light for 

 him. Wait till some cheap and easy method of decomposing water is 

 invented. You know water is composed of about eight parts of oxygen, a 

 supporter of combustion, and one part hydrogen, a highly inflammable 

 gas. By electrolysis the chemist decomposes water into these two gases. 

 Let the scientist who "knows enough to set the river afire" discover some 

 cheaper method than electrolysis, and lo! the ocean steamer will pump 

 her fuel from the sea she rides, and while water converted into steam shall 

 drive our railway engines, water transformed into fuel will feed their fur- 

 naces. Some fanciful genius recently predicted that man would yet utilize 

 the force that produces earthquakes for blasting purposes. The same 

 genius predicted that some cute Yankee would utilize the fifty-six million 

 horse-power wasted by the falling torrent of Niagara, while a stock com- 

 pany will make blast furnaces of Vesuvius, Mauna Loa, and Cotapaxi, and 

 another company issue stock for the enterprise of using the Aurora Bore- 

 alis to light the cities of St. Petersburg, Stockholm, and London. You 

 know it is the Gulf Stream that prevents England having the climate of 

 Labrador. Who knows but that if war ever again breaks out between 

 Jonathan and John Bull, some American De Lesseps will not cut a canal 

 right through Central America, turn the Gulf Stream into the Pacific and 

 freeze England into an iceberg? 



Do you say all this is fanciful ? It is no more fanciful than it would 

 have seemed fifty years ago to predict that men would travel by steam, 

 talk by lightning, and make that subtle and terrible spirit of the air, elec- 

 tricity, furnish the motive power to our machinery. I believe that the 

 progress of Christianity will yet bring about a moral millenium. So the 

 progress of civilization, science, and art, are destined to produce a physical, 

 a material millenium. The time is to come when our perfected race, 

 redeemed from ignorance and sin, shall rule right royally over their lower 

 natures and over all the forces and elements of matter. The Bible pre- 

 dicts that moral and material millenium when mind shall be enthroned 

 above matter everywhere. Then, the primal curse removed, "instead of 

 the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the briar the myrtle 

 tree." Then gold shall be cheap enough for paving-stones, and pearls be 

 built into the city walls. In that golden age to come, when men shall 

 beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks, 

 when the wilderness shall blossom as the rose, ignorance, poverty, toil, 

 vice, and misery shall be known no more. I repeat that man has only 

 captured the outposts of Nature. He has only landed on Plymouth Rock 

 and the whole continent is before him. 



But I come now to speak of the dignity and advantages of agriculture 

 as a pursuit. As it is the oldest so it is the most honored of all the arts. 

 He is a philanthropist who makes two blades of grass grow where but one 

 grew before. 



Said Daniel Webster: " There are three pillars upon which society rests: 

 Agriculture, Manufactures, and Commerce, but the greatest of these is 

 Agriculture." The king is fed by the field; without it the food of man is 

 limited to the flesh of wild animals and the spontaneous production of the 

 earth. Without it commerce and manufactures could not exist, and the 

 arts and sciences would be unknown. By the culture of the soil men are 

 able to produce more than they require, so that the remainder are enabled 

 to turn their talents and ingenuity to some other useful calling, the prod- 

 ucts of which may be given to the farmer in exchange for food. Here 

 then is the division of labor which is at the foundation of all social order 

 and civilization, and which is adopted more and more as communities 



