12 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



their ancestral estates, and are actually the best farmers the 

 world has ever known. At the risk of surprising some who 

 hear me, I assert that agriculture — not her armies, not her 

 wooden walls, not her commerce, and not her manufactures, as 

 vast as they are — has made Great Britain the mighty power, 

 the modern Rome, slie is. Her statesmen all see this ; and 

 agriculture is the goal to which every professional man and 

 every merchant desires to attain. Tliis was the employment of 

 the good Prince Albert, and it is the favorite pursuit of the 

 nobility. Not there, as is too often the case here, is it the desire 

 of the sons of farmers to hasten from the paternal acres to the 

 city, but the reverse ; and the daily prayer is, that kind Provi- 

 dence may permit a return to the peace and happiness of rural 

 life. 



To-day there are two great races with a future before them, 

 and tlireo great nations of those races, and all they are s])rings 

 from their attachment to the soil. The Sclavonian race in the 

 Russian Empire are in the far East, extending their dominions 

 from the Baltic eastward till they half encircle the globe, and 

 come down to British America in the West, claiming from the 

 Arctic Sea in Europe and Asia and America to boundaries on 

 the South which they are constantly pressing out, looking to 

 the Mediterranean in Europe, the Persian Gulf in Asia, and to 

 whatever they can get on this continent. Those tribes that 

 advanced westward from Russia in former times, as the Avars 

 and Bulgarians, were nomadic, attached to the soil no further 

 than the breeding of cattle required, and consequently remained 

 barbarian, and soon perished, as in more ancient times the 

 Goths, Vandals, and Lombards, who went down upon Rome, 

 were nomads and hunters, and all perished except where 

 agriculture civilized and saved them ; but the Sclavonians are 

 agricultural, as the Russians, and Poles, and other peoples that 

 now form the vast empire which promises to divide the world 

 and give it laws, with the Anglo-Saxons of the West. 



Tiic Anglo-Saxons are like them in their estimate of the 

 value, and in their uses of land. In the early age in which 

 Tacitus wrote, he said they " shunned the city, and souglit 

 their abodes by the sparkling fountains, along the green glades, 

 and in the solemn depths of the forest." Tlie same are they 

 to-day in England and her forty provinces, which make the 



