86 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



Bat I do think she is entitled to the encomiums bestowed 

 upon her long ago by one of her most distinguished sons. " The 

 ideal of a State is no longer one whose population, whether on 

 the Merrimack, or on the Connecticut, or by the side of the sea, 

 is disproportionately engaged in agriculture, and therefore with- 

 out that variety of pursuit which furnishes the wholesome 

 adjustment of demand and supply. That is now regarded as a 

 State, of high and complete development, whose producing 

 capacity keeps pace with its consuming capacity, its production 

 always suggesting and supplying its consumption, and its con- 

 sumption at every stage of increase exciting production ; thus 

 maintaining within a laboratory of demand and supply, and 

 carrying on without a free and profitable exchange of products 

 that blesses alike those who give and those who take ; not im- 

 poverished whenever a single staple shall fail or shall not be 

 wanted ; independent alike of a surplus around the Caspian or 

 a famine in Ireland ; generating new forms of want (for he 

 who creates a new want is a public benefactor) ; therefore open- 

 ing a way to new modes of labor, and interlacing the social 

 system with a network of mutually dependent interests and 

 classes ; saluting the buyer and seller of other States with the 

 symbols of its commerce ; musical in all its borders at home 

 with a machinery which in constancy and power transcends 

 even all human hands ; and finally, holding all the ranks and 

 all the departments of our social being in full sympathy with 

 an intelligent and vitalized agriculture which furnishes to them 

 all the breath of life. Such, I venture to state, is the form and 

 precedence which labor takes under the highest development of 

 our civilization. Such a condition is the result of so simple a 

 cause as the classification and separation of the occupations of 

 men, initiated in the first instance in Europe by the introduc- 

 tion of the useful arts, and already become the striking feature 

 of our own community. If we were searching for the nearest 

 approximation to such a model State in this country, I suppose 

 we should be authorized in accepting the judgment of our 

 neighbors and naming our own Commonwealth." 



I trust the day is not far distant when this ideal will be real- 

 ized, and when the agriculture which should be developed in a 

 busy and thriving community like ours will keep pace with its 

 kindred arts, and not in here and there a section, but through- 



