INSTABILITY OF AMERICAN LIFE. 397 
rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with 
which it waters the earth. The establishment of an approxi- 
mately fixed ratio between the two most broadly character- 
ized distinctions of rural surface—woodland and ploughland— 
would involve a certain persistence of character in all the 
branches of industry, all the occupations and habits of life, 
which depend upon or are immediately connected with either, 
without implying a rigidity that should exclude flexibility of 
accommodation to the many changes of external circumstance 
which human wisdom ean neither prevent nor foresee, and would 
thus help us to become, more emphatically, a well-ordered and 
stable commonwealth, and, not less conspicuously, a people of 
progress. 
