5f MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



They legislate for us. They rise into the highest seats of power. 

 The farmer's boy, to whom neither academy nor college was 

 ever opened, spends his youth in clearing the forests, and his 

 manhood in guiding the councils of his country through a great 

 war. dying a martyr to the cause of human freedom. A young 

 village merchant becomes secretary of the treasury, and upon 

 his integrity and sagacity, the country implicitly relies. The 

 highest judicial officer of the land once labored in the soil. 

 From our workshops and farms sprang the heroes of the war. 

 And all over the land stand the tasteful and elegant abodes of 

 those who toiled with their own hands to lay the foundation of 

 their prosperity, — of those who have not forgotten to cultivate 

 themselves as they have progressed, and who remember liber- 

 ally the intellectual, the moral and religious wants of the ris- 

 ing generation. How the sons of our working-men strive for 

 the high places ! I have not forgotton and I shall never forget 

 that boy from the State of Maine, whom I found in my early 

 life on his way to Boston, in search of labor and distinction. 

 He had left his home, two hundred miles away, had dropped a 

 tear as he took his last look of the old familiar spot, and hum- 

 ble too, where were his father and mother, and his two brothers 

 and sisters, as he told me, and where were his few well-read 

 books, to become a Boston printer; because he learned from 

 these books that Benjamin Franklin was a great man. He was 

 barefoot, and the miles had been long, but his courage had not 

 failed ; and as I took him into the great city, and found him 

 occupation, I learned the intelligence, and ambition and energy 

 which inspire the sons of Xew England labor. 



It is because labor thus lies at the foundation of society, is 

 the fountain from which all life springs, and comes so close 

 home to us all, that we regard it in this country with such ten- 

 der care. To educate it, all the schools are open. To elevate 

 it, all the rights aud privileges of citizenship are laid at its feet. 

 In many of the occupations its reward is ample, and it should 

 be so in all. The laborers upon the land in all the Northern 

 States to-day are well fed and housed, and share largely with 

 the landholders themselves the Drofits of the soil : and these 

 laborers constitute four-sevenths of the aggregate labor of the 

 country. The numerous persons employed in domestic service, 

 sharing as they do our dwellings with us, are receiving a gen- 



