AGRICULTURE AND CIVILIZATION. 3 



disproportionate bulk. The agriculture of the South was 

 certainly in this position. There were not wholesome manu- 

 factures enough joined with it to make a stable combination, 

 but it stood as a wall made wholly of mortar, an earthwork 

 merely. And it were no wonder, if, on an agriculture thus 

 overgrown and heedless of its natural associations, there were 

 ingrafted the false branches of oppression, fictitious license, 

 and unlawful ambition. Had it kept to its true relationship, 

 as that of our own section had been allowed to do, we should 

 not have seen it fostering slavery, discouraging manufactures, 

 nor despising liberal arts and education, even as it more than 

 despised a free government and the rights of the people. 

 But I hasten forward. A sound agriculture appears as the 

 best friend of honest trade. 



The highest civilization among men can, probably, never 

 overtop the necessity of commercial traffic. No speculations 

 of Fourier, no Republic of Plato, or Utopia of Sir Thomas 

 More, has yet been able to explain away the need of mercan- 

 tile exchanges of some sort among the people, and if so, 

 there is almost as great need that they should be honestly 

 conducted. And here I will ask only your attention to the 

 facts, since I have not time to enter upon the argument a priori. 

 Said the great Webster, in one of his moments of triumph, 

 "There is Massachusetts, look at her ! " Adopting his thought, 

 I say, "There is American Agriculture, look at her!" What 

 is her position before the world to-day, in the time when dis- 

 honesty and brazen robbery have almost their own way, and 

 more is written and printed upon financial criminality than 

 was upon the breadth of the civil war a dozen years ago? 

 What shall we say less than this, that the robbers and embez- 

 zlers, the rogues, burglars and defaulters, have not been found 

 among her followers! We will not overpraise the former; 

 but there is something about his calling that keeps him, 

 apparently, out of, and aloof from, most of such criminalities 

 as these. What it is, you can say as well as I; but certain 

 it is, that this infection has broken out, specially, rather 

 among the classes that cannot afford to wait for gain to grow 

 by any natural seedtime and harvest, but thirsting, like Orto- 

 grul of Basra, for that golden stream which is quick and 

 violent, have broken away from the trammels of the even life 



