453 AGRICULTURE. 



In England, agriculture has long been regarded as the most 

 favorable occupation for the development of Christianity, and 

 had, prior to the Reformation, received the special attention of 

 the clergy. The first gardens and orchards were those of the 

 Benedictine monks, and the general council of Lateran decreed 

 that, " all presbyters, clerks, monks, converts, pilgrims, and peas- 

 ants, when they are engaged in the labors of husbandry, shall, 

 together with the cattle in their plows and the seed which they 

 carry into the field, enjoy perfect security ; and that all who 

 molest and interrupt them, if they do not desist when admon- 

 ished, shall be excommunicated." Nor were the followers of 

 Luther less devoted to agriculture than their Roman predeces- 

 sors, especially when it was found that the doctrines of the 

 reformed Church made but slow progress in the cities and towns. 

 Dorsetshire and Wiltshire, the English homes of the Puritans 

 ere they made their exodus to a transatlantic Canaan, are even 

 now remarkable for their almost total absence of the usual 

 signs of trade and manufactures ; and we are informed by Ban- 

 croft, that those who first went to Holland were anxious to emi- 

 grate again because they " had been bred to agricultural 

 pursuits," yet were there " compelled to learn mechanical 

 trades." "They sought our shores," said Mr. Webster, " under 

 no high-wrought spirit of commercial adventure, no love of 

 gold, no mixture of purpose, warlike or hostile, to any human 

 being. Accustomed in their native land to no more than a 

 plain country life and the innocent trade of husbandry, they set 

 the example of colonizing New England, and formed the mould 

 for the civil and religious character of its inhabitants." 



This desire on the part of the Puritans that " New England " 

 should be an agricultural community was strikingly manifested 

 by the corporation of Massachusetts Bay, whose charter ex- 

 tended from a line three miles south of Charles River to another 

 three miles north of " any and every part " of the Merrimac. 

 Each contributor and each stockholder received two hundred 

 acres of land for every ,50 sterling paid in, while stock- 

 holders and others who emigrated at their own expense received 

 fifty acres for each member of their family and each "indented 

 servant." This shows that it was a rural home in this land of 

 freedom, and not town lots or semi-annual dividends, that these 



