No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 365 



and all the pernicious forces that have their genesis in the centers 

 of population. He suiters, albeit, more from vicious methods and 

 their incidental evils, than other classes. His power is known if 

 only asserted. When patience ceases to be a virtue, forbearance 

 becomes a crime; and of what avail is your moral force or influence, 

 if it be latent, dormant and not a living, active agency, — more potent, 

 as it might be, than any other that may be employed for universal 

 good. The single abuse of privilege knd advantage, in the direction 

 of geological matters, as described, and by which you have been 

 undone, for a quarter of a century, entirely justifies me in this di- 

 gression. I submit, that the truest citizen, the truest farmer, the 

 truest politician or statesman, the truest financier, the truest pat- 

 riot and American, is the truest Christian. 



Adverse comment on our great evils is not pessimism. Pessi- 

 mism is error in its most repulsive and forbidding presentation, — 

 cloudy, repellant, ominous. Optimism, so called, that connives at 

 offense, condones sin and is sanguine and elated, even when evils are 

 prevalent and almost all powerful; or is smiling and indulgent to- 

 wards the destruction that seems imminent, is hardly better than 

 avowed pessimism. In this respect, it is hardly less perilous than 

 any other heresy that becomes extant or any other evil contagion 

 that threatens. This view, as I entertain it, may not be roseate, or 

 meet the approval of those who would extenuate these things; but 

 it is reason, — a rational determination of conditions, and, as you 

 have suffered deprivation and deception, "you millionaire farmers,'" 

 so, also, you have the moral stamina and the intellectual status to 

 rectify these perverse things, ''these evils that so easily beset you," 

 by harmony of action and effort. I know of no politics quite so per- 

 nicious, no stealing quite so systematic, no wickedness in high places 

 quite so insolent, conspicuous, exemplary, or vicious, as here in Penn- 

 sylvania, and the record sustains the affirmation. 



Some of the gods that we seemingly and, perchance, ignorantly 

 worship, are the prevalent immoral forces which we see almost 

 every day, in fulsome exhibition or disclosures. 



Let these Penates be forgotten, the tutelar Deities be remanded 

 to oblivion, and the social, financial and political gods, that we, or 

 many of us, most adore, be set aside, discredited and repudiated, and 

 rising from our obedience, before their broken and shattered altars, 

 and in the light of our true faith, these same gods may become 

 known and recognized only as the ''Demons that we most despise." 



GEOLOGY AS RELATED TO AGRICULTURE. 



BT W. H. Stout, Pinegrove, Pa. 



Mountain, valley, hill and plain are features on all sides of us. 

 Were it not for elevations and depressions the surface of the earth 

 would be a monotonous plain, everywhere the same, the wealth of 

 minerals inaccessible and the soil the same everywhere. Great 

 convulsions, subsidences and upheavals, alternate periods of over- 

 flow and recession of oceans were the means of producing the condi- 

 tions as we observe them. 



