REVIEW. 



377 



conduces to health, industry, sobriety, tem- 

 perance, personal independence, and politi- 

 cal stability, than husbandry. Since the 

 world began, the soil has been the mother 

 and nurse of sound and healthy-hearted 

 men ; and cities are only saved from phy- 

 sical degeneracy, by large annual drafts 

 from the rural population. 



The effects of sound health and of par- 

 ticular occupations upon morals, is great. 

 Pursuits which thrive by competition, sharp- 

 en men's wits, and give force to enterprise ; 

 but too often, at the expense of simplicit}^, 

 truthfulness, and sensitiveness to honor and 

 integrity. 



More than anywhere else, men are train- 

 ed on the soil to industry, self-reliance, and 

 enterprise, without paying for prosperity by 

 their morals. While the farm underlays 

 all commercial and manufacturing interests, 

 and by its products maintains all other 

 forms of industry, yet, after all, its best 

 crop is the men it yields. 



In other pursuits men may be men. Other 

 avocations enlarge the understanding, task 

 the ingenuity, grind off the roughness of 

 nature, and give polish and beauty. But 

 there is not another department of society 

 which enables so many men to live as inde- 

 pendent principals. In almost all other pur- 

 suits men are, as employers and employed, 

 woven into the fabric, so that no thread can 

 be separated without violence to the whole. 

 The mechanic, honorable and useful, is af- 

 filiated to others for livelihood, and to some 

 extent must fluctuate with them. The 

 clothier cannot eat his fabrics, nor the car- 

 penter wear his structures, nor the mason 

 sleep upon his brick and mortar, nor the 

 smith feed hungry mouths from his anvil. 

 These are all grouped together in interde- 

 pendence. Thej' are not the separate trees 

 of the forest, each growing by its own root ; 

 but they are those trees felled, squared, 

 morticed and fitted together. 



The husbandman alone can find in his 

 province the elements of living — food, rai- 

 ment, shelter, and the raw material for almost 

 every physical want. Other processes aug- 

 ment the value of these rude elements. 

 But if worse comes to worst, the farmer 

 can best live within himself. The disas- 

 ters of speculation ; the flux and reflux of 

 VOL. II. 48 



commerce ; the sharp competition of traf- 

 fickers ; the feverish ambition, and the un- 

 wholesome public morals — courage with- 

 out conscience, and seldom conscience with 

 courage, enterprise without scruple, plau- 

 sible avarice, sleek and greed}^ dishonesties, 

 circumspect deceits, religion in form and 

 depravity in fact — these are not the off- 

 spring of the soil, but of the street, the ex- 

 change, the shop, the office, and the store.* 



Any land that has a large proportion of 

 its citizens upon the soil, will not, in emer- 

 gency, lack sturdy men. Nor will their in- 

 fluence stop within themselves ; for, as an 

 ice-mountain cools the sea and air for many 

 a league around it, so a vast substratum 

 of temperate, healthy-minded, industrious 

 men, will send up a powerful though im- 

 perceptible influence into all the superin- 

 cumbent classes of societ}'. 



The effect upon the character of being a 

 subordinate or a principal is great. In a 

 sense of responsibility, in taxation of intel- 

 lect, in providence, in making provision for 

 others ; in short, in developing the man, by 

 putting him upon his own foundation, and 

 both tempting and compelling him to work 

 by his own head, his own hands ; — to be 

 fertile in invention, to provide means for 

 the execution of plans ; to forecast, arrange, 

 and discriminate for himself, — in all these 

 respects, what other vocation has such pow- 

 er as that of husbandry ? 



Europeans, naturally, on hearing of the 

 looseness and casual lawlessness of new 

 settlements; of riots or brutal rencounters ; 

 of immense excitements in political cam- 

 paigns, believe, either that we must soon 



* It may be, that, in a better state of lhing:s than 

 now exists, a sejiarate estate may not be deemed so 

 great a good as it now is; or interdepemlence be 

 subject to such or so many ills. But whatever union 

 may be desirable, it should be the union of inde- 

 pendent men; nor should it ever destroy their in- 

 dividuality, or self-reliance, or self-develoi)ment. 

 It is union of strength that begets strength, not the 

 grouping of imbecile depenilence. While it is the 

 duty of the strong to bear with the weak, it is the 

 duty of the community to multiply the number of 

 its strong and to diminish the number of its weak. 

 What problem a future day and crowded popula- 

 tion may have to solve, we know not. But in our 

 day it is manifest that men would be made or saved, 

 if our cities could be swept with a besom, and hun- 

 dreds of thousands of lilly hands made acquainted 

 with the plow, ami thousands of necessitous ex- 

 pectants dispossessed of a mean shame for honest 

 labor and self-earned livelihood. 



