JOSHUA R. LAWTON'S ADDRESS. 231 



occupations will be satisfactory and attractive, if, disdaining the 

 help of science, and regarding whatever is new in practice as 

 innovating on good old habits, they go on through a fixed dull 

 round of listless toil, from year to year, barely supporting exist- 

 ence, unimproved and unimproving, doing nothing to relieve 

 agriculture of associations of toil and servitude which were 

 heaped upon it by the Vandals and the Goths of the barbarous 

 ages 1 * The moral estimate placed upon the profession of the 

 farmer is not yet sufficiently high, and Avhether it shall ever 

 become so, depends upon himself, and upon the moral and in- 

 tellectual cultivation which he brings to his profession. It is 

 not yet fully understood, that it is not the whole of a farmer's 

 duty to labor, but that his occupation is a sphere for the noblest 

 exercise of taste and intellect, in which art and science may 

 work with materials as exhaustless as the resources of the 

 globe. Let him call this art and science to his aid, and man, 

 not alone the geologist and the chemist, but man, the intelligent 

 farmer, may look upon himself and his calling with pride, and 

 with profound gratitude to the Author of his being and the 

 Creator of the world in which he lives. 



To render the earth in the greatest degree tributary to the 

 uses of man ; so to mix and manage its elements, as to make it 

 teem with vegetation in all its useful varieties, is a great natural 

 problem, vital to the existence and progress of society. To 

 solve this problem seems not to have been among the attain- 

 ments of ancient nations. With them, and indeed until times 

 quite modern, agriculture seems rather to have exhausted the 

 powers of the fertile portions of the earth's surface, than to 



* Let us look, for a moment, at the immense importance of the agricultural interest ; at the 

 immense capital employed in tillage, and the enormous amount of its products. Take the 

 fact, for instance, that the whole foreign commerce of Great Britain is actually worth less 

 than the annual grass-crop upon her home island, and that the united commercial and man- 

 ufacturing industry of the entire world fails to create values at all comparable with those of 

 agriculture. These things are not sufficiently realized by the farmer, and especially by the 

 young farmer. 



Look for a moment at the power of agriculture, as exhibited the present year. What 

 else could have snatched from the grave the millions dying by famine in another hemis- 

 phere 1 All the gold, and silver, and precious stones, and books of learning, in the world, 

 could not have saved life in that crisis. The famishing millions cried for bread, and bread 

 alone would save them ; and agriculture alone would furnish bread. 



