10 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



strike an early blow at the false life that usurps the true 

 vitality of the people. Open the resources of your lands and 

 the encouragements of your towns, and try to draw back 

 within wholesome and unfevered influences those who, in 

 delusion aud mistake, are thronging the streets of our cities, 

 and daily falling backward in all that belongs to a lofty social 

 culture. Cry to them, as you can well afford to do, that 

 when God made man to dress the soil, he proved his perfect 

 and sufficient wisdom. If you have in time past showed 

 discontent yourselves, and told your boys that farming was 

 poor business, retrieve your error before they are far gone in 

 business worse than any farming can be. Call to them that 

 contentment dwells indeed in the homestead ; and as the 

 faithful spies said of the promised land, " Come up and possess 

 it, for we are well able to overcome it." Then, when by your 

 judicious efforts, you have drawn back to your side some of 

 those who have wandered away, may we begin to breathe a 

 clearer atmosphere, and feel that the simoom that is called 

 enterprise and means madness, has passed us with its deadly 

 heat. Then, if you have reasonable success, and others 

 follow your example, when the great art of agriculture, first- 

 made of the Almighty, has come more nearly to its true esti- 

 mation among the people, may we hope for a pure and lofty 

 civilization, for the prosperity of liberty, uprightness, edu- 

 cation, science and art, and that good religion of God that 

 surmounts and includes the whole ! 



