ANNUAL ADDRESS. 119 



inlierited possessions, rioting from year to year, in a round of 

 pleasure, gayety, and mirth, of indulgence and excess, would 

 never think or dream, that to secure the perpetuity of such vast 

 estate, and the enjoyment of such pleasure, idleness, and mag- 

 nificence, they were indebted solely to the hardened palms, the 

 iron thews and sinews of the hob nailed clowns who sweat and 

 toiled from generation to generation as their agricultural ten- 

 antry, as the hewers of wood, the drawers of water, and the 

 tillers of the soil. These titled cumberers of the ground, with 

 great reluctance, would yield up to cultivation and agriculture, 

 land barely sufficient to fill their own granaries and coffers, and 

 support in the most straightened economy their menial and de- 

 pendent servitors, while all the rest must remain devoted, as it 

 always had been, to pleasure and sporting grounds. The most 

 hardy and industrious laborers of the field — husband their 

 means and economize as they might — could never expect to own 

 in their own right one single rood ot land, or even the thatched 

 house in which their ancestors had lived and died, and in which 

 they were born to a life of toil and hopeless dependence. 



Under such a system, with no possible incentive to thrift and 

 ingenuity, is it any wonder, that the arts of agriculture remained 

 so long, crude and unimproved ; that new and more profitable 

 modes of tillage and cultivation were not adopted, and that the 

 rich and exhaustless resources of the earth, were so long undis- 

 covered and undeveloped? And is it strange, that the common 

 laborers of the farm, were looked upon as an inferior order of 

 beings, and the practical business of agriculture regarded, as a 

 low and vulgar employment by the bleached and tender handed 

 gentry of those times. Under that system of political ecomony, 

 which is now regarded as the most pleasing, productive and 

 honorable pursuit, and upon which all other employments and 

 professions, and orders and classes of society, are most depen- 

 dent — was placed at the lowest and meanest grade of productive 

 industry. That contemptible prejudice may still exist to some 

 extent, among those who are too ignorant to know, and too in- 

 dolent to learn, that that system, like the laws and customs of a 

 barbarous antiquity, has long since passed away. (Applause.) 



