2 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



the surveillance of his fellow-workmen also. The mere day- 

 laborer — though with us the fact is denied — still wears the look 

 that tells of submissive, unthinking muscle, and too nearly 

 affiliates him with the beast he drives. The artist and man 

 of imagination, with face half-spiritualized, shows yet in that 

 face the deep uncertainties of his own living. And so of the 

 rest. But he who stands upon his own acres bares his brow 

 to heaven with another aspect. He stands nearer to a cer- 

 tainty. So far as human hands may hold it, the key of his 

 life and welfare is in his own grasp, and he knows it. And 

 thus he meets the world half-way ; able, if need be, to retire 

 to the fastness of his own economical home, and there defy 

 the besiegers. They may sit before his walls while they will : 

 but the rain and the sunshine are his, and the earth, despite 

 of foes, shall give him always meat and drink in its season. 



To prove the husbandman the original freeman might seem 

 superfluous. The examples of the world and of history are 

 almost too many. The freest people of Europe have perched 

 themselves upon the Alps, where, though the cultivated crops 

 are slender, the true agricultural spirit leads them, with free 

 breath and step unfettered, to pasture their herds, and sing 

 their Ranz des Vaches on the grassy slopes of Mount Rigi 

 and the Matterhorn. And shall we not recognize the fact, 

 that those time-honored stern barons of England, who gave 

 such resistless dicta to King John that he ground the chips of 

 the wayside between his teeth for rage when he dared not 

 deny them, — shall we not recognize in them the landed agri- 

 culturists of that day, and the progenitors of those whose 

 influence has since turned that land into a garden of fruitful- 

 ness, and her laws into institutions of liberty? 



I anticipate here an objection. It has been repeatedly said, 

 for years past, that our Southern States stood, as an agricult- 

 ural community, opposed in nature to the manufacturing 

 people of the North. Indeed, we well remember the boast of 

 secession, that they were thus agricultural, and such a people 

 could not be subjugated. Yet it was this same people who 

 gave to the world the revolting spectacle of domestic slavery, 

 and a great civil war waged for its defence. 



But I see no incongruity. It is not fortunate for the body 

 politic when any one industry grows to an inordinate or 



