10 MR. cushing's address. 



no hesitation in saying, that, in my opinion, the main-spring 

 of all this is land. The abundance of land has been the pri- 

 mary fact in the advancement of Spanish America, Portuguese 

 America, French America, and British America, as it has in 

 that of Australia. 



I lay down the following series of propositions, in elucida- 

 tion of the subject : — 



1. The possession and utilization of land are the natural 

 foundations of all society, because, without land, and its pro- 

 ductions, life is difhcult and precarious, if not impossible. In 

 the position thus broadly stated are included, of course, the 

 natural products, whether vegetable, animal, or mineral, of the 

 air and water as well as the earth. 



2. Manufacture, which is the modification of these products, 

 and commerce, which is their distribution by exchange, are 

 secondary in order of time and of necessity to the occupation 

 of the earth, which alone furnishes dwelling-place and food, 

 the prime exigencies of life, and which also furnishes the ob- 

 jects of manufacture and commerce. 



3. In all societies, land is the chief conservative element of 

 the society, of its institutions whatever they may be, and of 

 its particular spirit and moral identity. Whether the govern- 

 ment be aristocratical as in Great Britain, or democratical as in 

 the United States, its distinctive quality is more particularly 

 prominent in the agricultural interest. 



Hence it is that the great empire of the East, whose robust 

 identity of type has defied all the chances of time, proof alike 

 against external violence and internal corruption for thousands 

 of years, — I mean China, — has the unshaken basis of its great- 

 ness laid in agriculture, universally recognized by its sages and 

 its statesmen as the noblest of their ancestral arts, the palladi- 

 um of public stability, the inexhaustible source of national 

 prosperity, second in estimation to the cultivation of the mind 

 alone : in testimony of which it is, that the one great occasion 

 of the year, on which the ruler of three hundred millions of 

 men descends from that solitary elevation of his, which is half 

 the throne of a sovereign and half the shrine of a demigod, to 

 mingle in person with his people, is a solemn agricultural 



