1856.] Promotion of Scientific Agriculture. 287 



tites, and propensities have plunged him, and place liim upon the vantage 

 ground which Christianity and all its pure doctrines hold forth as his 

 ultimate, his millennial condition, ichen the sicord shall be hcafcn into the 

 plowshare and the spear into the pruning-hook, and when the rage for 

 war and conquest shall be exchanged for the peaceful and quiet pursuit 

 of agriculture. The whole history of the prosperity of our country, 

 whether general or sectional, social or political, demonstrates the asser- 

 tion that not to soil or climate, to sea or land, to zones or temperatures, 

 are we indebted for the wonderful display of genius and skill, but to 

 the influence, the elevating influence of educated labor. This fact is 

 attested from the first struggling condition of our early settlers to erect 

 the empire they founded down to the present. Hands that never bcfjre 

 toiled were retiuired to toil upon the rugged shores they had selected as 

 their^home. By this very condition of things, a prestige and dignity 

 were given to human industry which had not been connected with it in 

 modern times. The ^Yinthrops and Johnsons and Endicotts of that day 

 would have given dignity to any station. And as we behold them toil- 

 ing and striving to gain distinction and a subsistence, no less conspicu- 

 ously do their genius and talents shine forth because seen in the shop of 

 the mechanic or the field of the agriculturist. Corroborative of this, 

 we boldly assert that the herdsmen and shepherds and tent-makers and 

 fishermen of Judea, the sculptors and artizans of Greece, the plowmen 

 of Eome, as well as the learned printers, shoemakers, stone-cutters, and 

 blacksmiths of our own times, have exhibited more true mental power, 

 and exerted a more deep and lasting influence for good on mankind, 

 than all the critics, and orators, and sophists, and philos'^phers, and 

 pedants, from Adam's day to ours. 



What then might not be expected, if all the infinite practical sources 

 of mental and moral culture which God has connected with agriculture 

 were as fully developed and applied to the training of the better class 

 of minds to be engaged in it, as even the sources in profesi^iunal life now 

 are ? And we have been permitted to see there is much in this pursuit 

 to which God has consigned the great ma£S of mankind, peculiarly favor- 

 able, instead of unfavorable as is commonly supposed, to the fullest 

 growth and development of mind and manhood, had it not been for the 

 pride of caste, and of ambition, of pedantry, and of power, of bigotry, 

 and tyranny in all ages except in brief periods of the Hebrew common- 

 wealth and in our own free republic, that have been turned away from 

 it, and' against it, and rebels who would not obey God, and eat their 

 bread by the sweat of their brows, have, by one pretext or another, con- 

 tinued to rule the woild. And much the same tendency is perceptible 



