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their excellences and tlieir defects had been studied, and you have certainly- 

 succeeded in combining all their advantages while you have apparently avoided • 

 their defects. You may, therefore, teach those who taught you, as the lessons 

 of experience train up the young and the new, till they, combining and arrang- 

 ing systematically all the best hints of their teachers, may be expected to ex- 

 cel them, and to be able to pay back in tuition all their debts to the old and the 

 past. 



Forty-three years ! They carry us back to the times before the last war, 

 when men, flushed with unparalleled commercial success in the East, began to 

 look with contempt upon an occupation to which all alike owed their subsist- 

 ence. Tales of untold fortune ran like an electric shock through the country, 

 and every rich cargo that landed from its tedious voyage, drew many a youth 

 from the plough and the sweet influences of the country, to measure tape by the 

 yard, to copy legers and day-books, deluding himself with the idea that this 

 was the only way to make a fortune or to win a fair lady ! 



Happily for the Commonwealth, this mania received a timely check. The 

 tide was partially turned, and a few enlightened and patriotic men threw the 

 weight of their influence into the opposite scale, and taught that the true 

 wealth of a country was rather in the improvement of its agriculture. They 

 embarked in agricultural enterprises, awakened a spirit of agricultural im- 

 provement, invested capital in farms, planted trees and orchards, and gradually 

 changed the public sentiment till societies were formed in several counties, and 

 the patronage of the State was secured. 



These men deserve the grateful remembrance of their posterity. Others 

 have done more for their country on the field of battle, or perhaps in the 

 cabinet, but few have done greater real service than those who have devoted 

 themselves to the improvement of the agriculture of a country. Among them 

 indeed are numbered, in all ages of the world, the greatest minds, the highest 

 intellects, and the noblest men. We hear of them, perhaps, as having achieved 

 honor and glory in other lines of distinction, some of them heroes who fought 

 for liberty and went down amid the grateful tears of their country, some of 

 them statesmen who wielded a political power equal to that of kings and 

 princes, but, beneath it all, was a deeper sentiment ; the great interests of agri- 

 culture and its improvement lay nearest their hearts. Who that has read the 

 agricultural letters of the great Washington, has not felt this ? 



Indeed the natural tastes of every man invite to it. Every heart yearns 

 towards the earth. To look upon, to love and improve it, is no less an indica- 

 tion than it is the result of purity of heart. This, I say, is the natural instinct 

 that binds us by something like a filial sentiment to the mother of us all. 



I know there is still a perverted sentiment in the minds of some, a languid 

 excess of refinement, which attaches a sort of contempt to the labors of the 

 farm. I know it has happened within the memory of men still living, that the 

 other arts, like proud and ungrateful children, have looked down with an air of 

 patronage upon their parent, as if they did not owe their origin and their 

 breath of life to the culture of the soil. I will not say what may have been 



