8 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



missed that picture, though some might have gaped a very 

 little while they admired it. For who, of all our people, seize 

 most greedily upon all such refinements, when available, if not 

 these? Who likes best to improve his place, and make a 

 graceful drive up from the highway to its door? Who will 

 try to set his trees to the best advantage, and dispose his 

 flower-beds well before the house, for the finest effect of the 

 posies that grow there, and of the matrons and maidens that 

 tend them? Who buys a good picture, when he can, and a 

 handsome book often, and is even willing to dare to look on 

 a premium chromo, rather than have nothing of the kind? 

 Take your fine performers, and go among the farms of New 

 England, with a choice entertainment. You will bring to your 

 hall twenty cultivators for one of other callings, and their pro- 

 portion to the whole population will be fifty per cent, greater 

 than in any city you can visit. The man who has all these 

 things crowded and piled along his daily path, gets indifferent 

 to them ; but the yeoman's appetite is always sharp, and, more 

 than that, it is rarely unnatural. 



After this outline of a proof that need not be further 

 detailed or extended, I will leave it for your own judgment 

 whether the natural influences of agricultural pursuits are not 

 related to a high civilization in a way most favorable to the 

 latter. Nor will I advance the question, almost impertinent 

 here, whether such a civilization be not the most desirable of 

 all things for human beings, dwelling together in anything 

 called society. But a plain conclusion must follow. It may 

 not happen, as matter per consequence, that the thoughts and 

 habits of the yeomanry of the country will be fully up to the 

 natural and theoretical demands of their pursuit. And there- 

 fore am I here to-day, not to deck your farms with rhetorical 

 rainbows, nor flatter you with high commendation, but to 

 show you that you have a duty, and that the circumstances of 

 the age are making it more and more imperative. 



The common trite expressions" as to the antithesis of town 

 and country, are not necessary to be here repeated. We are 

 all well aware that the correcting, revising, recuperating force 

 resides in the country, for the restraint of the hot and seeth- 

 ing evils that breed so fast and foully in the cities. Nothing 

 to-day holds the vicious multitudes of New York in check 



