194 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. ' [Jan. 



cities under monarchies. Hence it is in cities only that 

 anarchy and socialism are extensively preached. Those who 

 preach the doctrine that there should be no private owner- 

 ship of land, that a man should not own even the home he 

 lives in ; who think that the chief value of agricultural land is 

 given by the neighbors, and not by the owner's industry, and 

 that all farms should l)e rented to the farmer by the State, 

 — are all of them men who never worked on a farm. They 

 never with hardened hands cut down and subdued the forests 

 to the plough ; they never with aching backs picked the 

 stones from the reluctant soil ; they never planted orchards 

 that their children and children's children might eat the fruit 

 thereof; and they have most extraordinary city notions as 

 to wherein the real value of agricultural land lies. 



This doctrine is a foreign importation ; but, in a free 

 country like this, there will always be such a class preaching 

 heresy and working mischief. To meet them and success- 

 fully resist them, we need an intelligent, conservative class 

 of land owners. 



American farmers were framing and adopting a constitu- 

 tion and peacefully electing a president, just as the French 

 revolution was raging and the government being destroyed. 

 American farmers kept American politics cool and the land 

 peaceful, while that country was suffering under revolution 

 and blood. There, ignorant peasants were striking wildly 

 for what they believed to be their rights ; here, intelligent 

 farmers, having achieved independence, were trying to pre- 

 serve it by a new kind of conservatism, — a written consti- 

 tution, something before unknown in the history of nations. 



I had intended to speak of the present attitude of the city 

 newspaper press on this matter, but time forbids ; I can only 

 hint that so many of them are in the hands or under the man- 

 agement of foreiofuers, whose education and associations are 

 of a farming peasantry, that they begin to look at American 

 farmers in the same light. 



Under new and modern conditions, new forms of danger 

 will continue to arise to the nation, when the country will 

 need the same kind of strength that has been its preservation 

 heretofore ; that is, a powerful class of independent land 

 owners, for the full and free development of men capable of 

 being leaders in thought and politics, and for the conserva- 



