50 N. H. STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



great town, and the village blacksmith and tailor exist no 

 longer. The inconveniences of this state of things had 

 Bot been distinctly felt and appreciated in England until 

 the fruitless efforts to raise men for military service in the 

 East showed that the English, in ceasing to be a rural, had 

 ceased also to be a martial nation, and that a manufactu- 

 ring and a civic people have neither the moral nor the 

 physical qualities which made the British armies so for- 

 midable in their wars with Napoleon. 



Whether these evils are compensated by the advantages 

 resulting from division of labor, augmented mechanical 

 power, and other means of increasing the total industrial 

 product of the empire, it is perhaps too early to pronounce. 

 But it must be remembered that in all history, the growth 

 of cities at the expense of the rural districts, which is be- 

 coming noticeable even in our young republic, has proved 

 a token and a near precursor of national decrepitude and 

 decay. The city-bred youth, with an enfeebled physical 

 frame, has a precocious development, a one-sided and pre- 

 mature culture, a quickness of intellect, a promptness of 

 movement, and an unnaturally stimulated sensibility, or 

 rather sensitiveness, which give him an apparent superiori- 

 ty over his calmer, slower, more impassive brother of the 

 country. But their superiority is at best a superficial and 

 unreal advantage. Man's true strength of mind and body, 

 his physical, moral and intellectual nature, are most com 

 pletely, equally, and harmoniously evolved, trained and 

 perfected in modes of life akin to that which God prescrib- 

 ed to our first parents when he made them tillers of tho 

 ground. 



But I return from this digression. Advancing towards 

 central and southern France, you enter the region devoted 

 to the growth of the grape ; here you find no spreading vine, 

 climbing with twining tendril and swinging in gay festoon 

 from tree to tree, or limb to limb, o'erarching cool arbors 

 with luxuriant foliage, or trained on painted trellis ; but 



