14 



The temptations of good land will last longer than those 

 of gold mines. There is a love for acres. There is a charm 

 in independent proprietorship. There is health, and happi- 

 ness, and a sense of freedom, in rural life and rural labor. 

 There is a proud consciousness of virtue, and of worth, and 

 of self-reliance, in the breast of the honest and industrious 

 farmer, like that to which the simple shepherd of Shak- 

 speare gave utterance, when reproached by the clown with 

 a want of courtly manners : — 



" Sir, I am a true laborer. I earn that I eat, get that I 

 wear ; owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness ; glad 

 of other men's good, content with my harm ; and the great- 

 est of my pride is to see my ewes graze, and my lambs 

 suck." 



Feelings and instincts like these, to which no bosom is a 

 stranger, will outweigh and outlast the temptations of the 

 richest placers of the Pacific, and will create a yearning 

 towards the broad fields and noble forests of the great 

 West, in the hearts of our enterprising young men and 

 young women, as long as a single township or a single 

 quarter section shall remain unsold or unsettled. That 

 whole vast domain will thus continue to operate in the 

 future, as it has operated in the past, as a continual govern- 

 ment bounty upon the multiplication of farmers, and the 

 extension of agriculture. 



And now, having said thus much, and the limits of this 

 address will not allow me to say more, both in regard to 

 what Government cannot do for American agriculture, and 

 also as to what it actually has done in the past, I come to 

 a brief consideration of what it can do, and what it ought 

 to do, in the future. 



In the first place, it can adopt systematic, comprehensive, 

 and permanent measures for ascertaining from year to year, 

 or certainly from census to census, the actual condition of 

 our country in relation to agriculture, the quantity of land 



