CHAIRS OF AGRICULTURE. G21 



Too well we know that the advance of moral truths are slow, but thank God, 

 with the light and power of the Press, wc may hope they will be sure. If not, 

 to what end has God endowed us with those faculties, which seem to be lifting 

 us nearer and nearer to Himself? The punishment of death denounced against 

 all who should teach any oiher philosophy than that of Aristotle, was not re- 

 voked until fifty years after that Philosophy was forgotten. It was fifiy years 

 after the death of Harvey, when the faculty of medicine in Paris admitted the 

 circulation of the blood. When did the same faculty admit patatoes to be whole- 

 some ? One hundred years after it had been proved by experience, and when 

 the decree which forbade the use of them had been revoked. 



The Parliament issued a like decree against emetics, and against Brissot, a cel- 

 ebrated physician of the sixteenth century. Contrary to the common practice, 

 he bled, for pleurisy, in the side where the patient suffered most. This new prac- 

 tice was denounced to Parliament by the old physicians. Brissot was pronounced 

 infamous, and forbidden to bleed for the future on the side where the pleurisy 

 was. The affair being reported to Charles V, he was going to issue a similar 

 decree, but it happened at the instant that Charles III, Duke of Savoy, died of 

 pleurisy after having been bled in the ancient manner. 



The time will come, unless military power should too soon extend its cancer- 

 ous influences ineradicably throughout the vital parts of our body politic, that a 

 portion at least of the many millions now given to war, and warlike preparations, 

 will in all countries, and especially in ours, be given to that best of all prevent- 

 ives of war — the dissemination of knowledge ; and generations to come will look 

 back with shame and blush for that barbarous epoch in the history of their 

 fathers, when eighty per cent, of all public burdens icere imposed in prepara- 

 tions for shedding human blood ! and that, too, by laws enacted by the Ptep- 

 resentatives of Agriculturists ! 



A truth, by being new, shocks public opinion ; and hence, though at last it 

 may be generally received, it is a long time before it can overcome the preju- 

 dices that oppose its early progress. Thus, few public men can be found cour- 

 ageous enough to go for the right, and leave the rest to Heaven. 



Well we know, on the point of Congressional power, and pretension to the 

 diffusion of Agricultural knowledge, that they do now exercise the power, and 

 shab off the landed interest with a small appropriation for an annual collection and 

 diffusion of Patent-Office Reports, which, we understand, and doubt not, will be a 

 valuable collection of facts ; but the craven spirit who is willing to receive this 

 crumb from the public stores as the portion which the landed interest has a right 

 to demand, out of the millions it contributes of the public burdens for the bene- 

 fit of other classes, deserves to be placed, in the esteem of all well judging 

 friends of Agriculture, on the footing of the starving dog that snaps at a bone, 

 or the senseless kitten that is amused and satisfied at playing with the june-bug 

 that buzzes at the end of a thread, held by a child ! 



No, no ! our country is too distant and too powerful to be in any danger of in 

 vasion, and the best preservers of peace are tvell-infor7ned minds, in strong, well- 

 fed bodies ! Let the landed interest therefore insist on those who pretend 

 to represent them, drawing no money from their pockets except for the diffusion 

 of useful knowledge, and the improvement of the great machine whose produce 

 gives employment, comfort, life and subsistence to every other industry and em- 

 ployment. Let devotion to these measures be substituted for other mercenary 

 party tests in measuring the merits of public men. 



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