in defiance of this reiterated truth, as an occupation, agriculture of 

 itself, is degraded. Let politicians, or demagogues chant their paens 

 to the tillers of the soil as they may, and tell them of the honor, and 

 the dignity of their estate ; yet, practically, simple farming is consi- 

 dered by those who assume to give tone and opinion in social and po- 

 litical life, an inferior occupation, fit only for dull, unthinking, and 

 uneducated men. Were it not so, why are the Agricultural ranks so 

 continually deserted by our active and aspiring youth for the more 

 worldly popular pursuits, under the belief that they are more advan- 

 tageous 1 Look at our great, bustling cities, and towns. See on all 

 sides our professions crowded to excess ; with, among the masses 

 which throng them, but a comparatively few who are successful either 

 in fame or fortune. View our merchants, and shopkeepers, overrun 

 and undermined in competition with one another 5 and clerks, and 

 shopboys plentier and cheaper on their hands than the wares they 

 hold on sale ; and all the motley congregations which are drawn 

 about them by the spirit of adventure and of novelty while the petty 

 political offices of the day are held up like lottery tickets, to an un- 

 scrupulous and indiscriminate scramble; all for the possession of a 

 fancied prize in the great raffling match of adventure ; while the shop 

 of the mechanic, or the artizan, which holds, out a safe and durable re- 

 ward to honorable labor, is hard pressed to find apprentices ; and the 

 broad, inviting acres of the farmer, are lying sterile or unproductive, 

 for lack of cultivation. 



In ministering to this vitiated appetite of discontent, the farmer 

 himself is oft times blameable. In a too humble estimate of his own 

 condition and character, and in the absence of those advantages for 

 his children, of which he himself has felt the want; with a fond desire 

 for their welfare, he has encouraged their early restless propensities ; 

 and hoping that the wide world of chance, or speculation, or luck, 

 would cast them in a happier lot than his own, has pitched the al- 



