GEORGE R. RUSSELL'S ADDRESS. 603 



quently on a generous feeling growing from accustomed asso- 

 ciation. They are more powerful than law, for they enlist the 

 sympathy of all, and create a rnle of government which is too 

 popular to be broken. Would that our household friends had 

 such a shield; relying for security, not on the statutes, but the 

 clemency of men. 



However far we may fall below excellence in our farming, 

 we have certainly reason to congratulate ourselves on the ad- 

 vance that has been made. Besides the more solid advantages, 

 such as adaptation of manures to soils, rotation of suitable 

 crops, draining and reclaiming land, which turn impassable 

 swamps, covered with bushes, into ornamental and fruitful 

 fields, there has been that attention to outward appearance 

 which indicates taste, system, order, and an appreciation of the 

 beautiful, which is a valuable auxiliary to well-regulated judg- 

 ment. There is an improvement in rural architecture; a care 

 for the comfort of animals, some solicitude about planting trees 

 and repairing fences, and a laudable desire to do well and look 

 well has become general. We have found out that it is as easy 

 and as economical, to erect a habitation with some pretension to 

 elegance, as to disfigure the side of the highway with a pine 

 box, an ugly clump of clapboards and shingles. We begin to 

 think it is not profitable, or becoming, to allow the worm to 

 spin his web in our apple trees, till the orchard looks like the 

 ruins of a wasting conflagration. The practice is growing less 

 frequent of suffering our cattle to carry about them a proportion 

 of the barn-yard, solidly caken on for a winter over-coat, while, 

 in regard to such remnant of the hide as is visible, a course of 

 exposure and low diet, like the tale that Hamlet's father could 

 have told, causes "each particular hair to stand on end." It 

 has also been discovered, that however appropriate the fur of 

 the beaver may be for the head, it has a marked incongruity 

 when protruding through a broken window. This peculiarity 

 to our landscape, might once have elicited some expression of 

 surprise at the unusual number of hatters' shops, were it not 

 corrected by the conviction, that no sane mechanic would ever 

 exhibit such specimens of his handicraft. On the whole, wo 

 have arrived at the rather reasonable conclusion — that trees, 



