38 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



RELATION OF AGRICULTURE TO THE STATE. 



From an Address before the Berkshire Society. 



BY R. GOODMAN. 



Our Puritan forefathers, at the time they threw off tlie spiritual 

 yoke, and claimed the right of the unadulterated gospel, lopped 

 off also from their landed system all such excrescences as were 

 begot of feudal tenures, and made the ownership of land the 

 privilege of all. They recognized in its fulness the truth that 

 popular liberty cannot exist where there is no intelligent yeo- 

 manry or independent tillers and owners of the soil. 



The accumulation of land under one ownership, whether of 

 corporations, civil or ecclesiastical, or individuals, has in this 

 country been always looked upon with jealousy, and whilst the 

 absence of any laws encouraging entails or primogenital rights 

 will always prevent a continued holding of large bodies of land 

 in families, the existing legislation amply protects us from the 

 grasping sway of corporate bodies. We may thus look to al- 

 ways have among us an independent class of agriculturists, own- 

 ing and tilling their own soil, removed in a measure from the 

 excitements of the great head centres, yet closely connected 

 with every part of the Commonwealth by the iron veins of the 

 rail and telegraph, that ramify from centre to circumference. 



We have lived under a government so paternal that it is only 

 when a great crisis calls for the energies of its sons to rouse in 

 its defence, that we realize its sway over us ; a government 

 whose institutions are more popular and better adapted to the 

 felicity of the human race than any that ever existed — a gov- 

 ernment that calls to our shores the poor and meritorious of 

 every clime, and tenders to all, whether of foreign or domestic 

 birth, a farm in the teeming soil of the West, almost without 

 money and price. Religious and civil freedom go hand in hand ; 



