POSITION OF THE FARMER. 83 



all other occupations it is liable to perversion. The conservative 

 virtues which belong to it, and which establish tjie confidence 

 mankind feel in it, may be converted into the hardest and most 

 immovable defects. Still it retains its social position, furnishing 

 mankind food, supplying muscles for labor in the various arts, 

 creating and employing the mechanic and the manufacturer, 

 and cultivating man to a height of physical and moral 

 excellence which supplies the raw material out of which the 

 leaders of our race are created. Do you doubt this ? Go with 

 me to the pulpit and learn how large a proportion of the talent 

 there displayed had its origin in the farming population. Enter 

 the bar, and you will find the sons of farmers there exercising 

 the intellectual and physical strength imparted to them in their 

 youth on the farms of their fathers. Look around the forum, 

 and the greatest statesmen there long to return once more 

 to the acres where their growing powers were moulded, — to 

 the rural life whence they inherited the natural powers which 

 lie at the foundation of their success. Learn from these men 

 the first lesson which they teach — that agriculture literally 

 gives birth to society, and recuperates it with unceasing bounty. 

 And learn moreover, as has been justly said, that " it would 

 be no difficult task, it would require no special pleading, no 

 ingenious tricks of argument, to prove that all human knowledge, 

 science, art, culture and skill, with some of the richest means 

 of happiness, have come directly to man through the tillage of 

 the earth." 



Agriculture lies not only at the foundation of the most 

 substantial social virtues, but also at the foundation of the most 

 substantial social prosperity. In our own country it is the 

 prevailing occupation of a free, industrious and thriving people, 

 impatient to grow rich. Three-fifths of the population of the 

 United States rely upon it for their subsistence, and derive from 

 it all the means they enjoy of obtaining moral and intellectual 

 culture. Two millions four hundred thousand of our able- 

 bodied citizens labor on the soil ; and they hold in their hands 

 three-fifths of the whole wealth of our country, pouring annually 

 more than a thousand millions of dollars into the store-houses 

 of the nation. And how steadily and surely this great 

 occupation goes on ! To the miUions devoted to it, financial 

 crises are unknown. While the ardor of ambition and the flush 



