52 [Senate 



It is strange that it should have been overlooked, even in the dark- 

 est days of despotism and ignorance and superstition, that he who 

 sows the seed and reaps the harvest, works not only with the plow 

 and with the hoe and with the scythe, but that he wields, far beyond 

 the laborer in any other branch of industry or art, the elements and 

 powers of nature. There is certainly no pursuit in which so many 

 of the laws of nature must be consulted and understood, as in the 

 cultivation of the earth. Every change of the season, every change 

 even of the winds, every fall of rain, must affect some of the mani- 

 fold operations of the farmer. In the improvement of our various 

 domestic animals, some of the most abstruse principles of physiology 

 must be consulted. 



Is it to be supposed that men thus called upon to study, or to ob- 

 serve the laws of nature, and labor in conjunction with its powers, 

 require less of the light of the highest science, than the merchant or 

 manufacturer 1 Or is it to be believed, that men who go weekly, al- 

 most daily, to different occupations, changing with the almost unceas- 

 ing changes of the seasons, and whose business is to bring to maturi- 

 ty such a multiplicity of products, exercise less the highest intellect- 

 ual faculties of man, than the laborer who, day after day, and year 

 after year, follows the unchanging manipulations of art? 



Happily for the interests of the farmer, the history of our coimtry 

 abounds in evidence that this great misconception of the nature and 

 tendency of agricultural labor, no longer exists. I cannot, gentle- 

 men, allow this occasion to pass without referring to a recent event, 

 which, with whatever diversities of opinion we may regard the great 

 political questions which agitate our country, we, as farmers, cannot, 

 dwell upon without emotions of pride and pleasure. When the peo-' 

 pie of a great State, which, in population, in wealth, in power, if it 

 had not voluntarily surrendered its immunities, might stand up among 

 the independent empires of the earth, without fear and without re- 

 proach — of a State, which, in achievements of industry, of genius, of 

 enterprise, we may search the history of the world, and search in vain 

 for a rival — when the people of such a State turn to the ranks of its 

 practical farmers for the unimpeachable integrity, the enlightened 

 wisdom requisite to administer their highest trust, we may well claim 

 that agricultural labor is not inconsistent with the highest intellectual 

 cultivation and moral power. 



