AGRICULTURE AND CIVILIZATION. 5 



anything. It is that which shows him that he has a perfect 

 right to be president, but lays its hand on his head, and prays 

 God he never may wish to be. In a word, it is that which 

 can instruct the child, and will, wherever it meets him, — 

 whether in the school-room, palace, or the factory at noontime ; 

 whether in the woods by the sled, with the oxen chewing 

 stalks in the snow, or at mother's knee by the fireside, where 

 Doddridge learned the story of the cross, and West earned 

 the loving kiss that "made him a'painter." 



Such, reduced to simple facts, is nearly the education that 

 our own Essex has alwaj^s encouraged. I will put this state- 

 ment on trial -for its verit}^, and any one may look up the 

 evidence. We have not despised the college or the classics ; 

 yet, the young men who, from our midst, have entered on 

 them, have carried thither more of sound and useful education 

 than they added thereafterward. It was learned at home, by 

 snatches, after supper, or in the little common school, a mile 

 from the house in summer, but surely two when the snow was 

 deep. It was learned because it was hungered for, and not 

 because it was fashionable ; because the boy verily thought 

 that strength and wisdom were the noblest attributes of man, 

 and to these he labored gloriously to aspire. Such motives 

 have, for two hundred years, urged the youth of Essex forward 

 toward learning, and the result — is it not written and laid up 

 in the archives of the nation and the world ? Yet, all this is 

 not the way of merchants and manufacturers. It is hardly 

 the method of the counting-room or the quarter-deck. But 

 where you see the cows thick on the pastures, where you can 

 count the corn-rows a mile off, in spring, for freedom of 

 weeds, and the apples are heaped under the autumnal trees 

 as if busy ants had piled them, — there are boys who demand, 

 and find out, why they carry one for every ten, and girls that, 

 being taught the revolution of the earth, would at least get 

 an idea that it turned over. But a step beyond this shows 

 agriculture as (he stimulus of science. 



The world is to-day proud of its science, — proud of what it 

 has learned of the laws of nature. It is so proud and so 

 pleased with its scales and measures of the inanimate world, 

 that it aspires to place them on the pinions of life, the rain- 

 bow of the mind, and even the still small voice of Deity. I 



