206 BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



manufacturer lie made. All his life he was a farmer by sym- 

 pathy, and ever ready to consider the rights and wrongs of the 

 farm. Such men would rather buy what they want in the open 

 market, or go without, than seek to depress valuable farm prop- 

 erty by insidious social changes and long-continued adverse legis- 

 lation. It is the thoughtless, ambitious, half-educated, enterprising 

 young fellows, who were not pinched in the last panic, that start 

 up and do the mischief. It is the imwarranted exploits of these 

 men who give our corporations their bad names, and finally, per- 

 haps, bring their joint-stock fellowship in iniquity to grief. 



I was riding with a youngerly manufacturer the other day, dur- 

 ing a half-hour's interval of his immense business. I say young- 

 erly, but he is already gray and bald and somewhat given to 

 philosophy. "What do you think?" said he to me; "It is set- 

 tled across the water (meaning in England) that manufacturing 

 develops better men and women than agriculture does." 



" Wal," said I, doubting his judgment in such an important 

 matter — for how can a manufacturer, driving through an old 

 country by railway, form anything but a hasty railway-man's 

 opinion of that country ? — "If the laws and customs of a country 

 are so constructed that manufacturing, or politics, or preaching, or 

 any other employment or profession pays better than farming for 

 a long series of years, be ' sure bright boys and girls will be at- 

 tracted from the latter business till an apparent show of degrada- 

 tion will result. Then," says I, "if the worst comes to the worst, 

 with such a foundation employment as agriculture, delegates will 

 have to run the other way." 



Whether convinced or not, he didn't say any more upon that 

 head. The fact is, American agriculture is beginning already to 

 attract recruits and capital from other employments, as the decaying 

 agriculture of Greece and Rome did. I am sometimes afraid, how- 

 ever, that our agricultural poets, philosophers, and politicians know 

 as little really of the springs of national life and have as little 

 power to hinder the approach of national destruction as ancient 

 farm poets, philosophers, and politicians did in their time. Per- 

 haps you noticed what a weak agricultural paragraph the President 

 had in his message ? And what energy our government shows in 

 protecting the foreign citizen escaping to our shores? We want 

 the nation just as quick to protect old settlers from oppression as 

 new ones. A back-country' farmer or mechanic in dread of his 

 property or life must not have his children taught by the course of 



