THE FARMER. 83 



more irresistibly overcome by sleep than any other classes of 

 workers, have shorter and less wakeful evenings, and of course, 

 are less inclined and less able to fill up their leisure hours with 

 reading or vigorous thinking. I have even heard it remarked 

 that a Sunday congregation composed mostly of farmers, will 

 have more numerous and sounder sleepers in it, than a con- 

 gregation composed more of mechanics or merchants, not wil- 

 fully or by their own fault, but because when they stop to rest, 

 their brain is overcome by an unconquerable stupor induced by 

 the nature of their occupations. 



This theory of the deteriorating effect of agricultural labor 

 is a favorite one with the apologists for slavery, enabling them 

 to maintain that the degraded mental condition of plantation 

 slaves is not owing to their being slaves, nor wholly to alleged 

 inferiority of race, but to the necessary influence of field work, 

 continued through a lifetime and from generation to generation. 



Our opponents, whether those who represent the slave system, 

 or those who represent the interests of the old world aristocra- 

 tic system, avail themselves of this theory, to justify their predic- 

 tion of the sure decay and final downfall of our free labor and 

 democratic polity. Your field workers, they say, must, by the 

 nature of their employment, gravitate towards the peasant con- 

 dition. And the peasantry, black or white, all the world over, 

 have been, or have become, ignorant, stupid, brutal, incompe- 

 tent to rule, needing to be ruled. When your working farmers, 

 i. e., the bulk of your population, shall have reached this con- 

 dition, their rule will be insufferable, and there is the end of 

 your institutions. 



To these prophecies of evil, in which the wish is father to 

 the thought, we reply : Look around, look at the facts. Do 

 we not continually meet with practical hard-working farmers, 

 who are among the most intelligent, well-informed men, the 

 most acute and vigorous thinkers, that we find in any class ? 

 And the great agricultural masses are not found to be the peril, 

 but the stay and strength of the nation. They are not the men 

 who denounce popular education, or hold back from a liberal 

 support of it. They, as a body, are steady, moderate, loyal, 

 in political action. Not among them is engendered the venom 

 of party politics. It is not this class that the wily demagogue 

 or political adventurer, or minister of treason, can delude and 



