MASSACHUSETTS FARMER. 4G1 



To such as arc willing to give up the priceless blessings 

 which New England oilers, to go forth and plant a race of free- 

 men there, there is not a heart that ever felt one glow of gen- 

 erous enthusiasm that docs not bid them God speed in their 

 enterprise. Let them go; let them by their presence turn that 

 wretched blunder of slave propagandism into a barren tri- 

 umph ; and when in after ages that beautiful region shall be 

 teeming with its millions of freemen, the memory of these 

 pioneers of Freedom will be dear to a grateful nation. 



I had thought of speaking of the sunny South, and the at- 

 tractions it holds out to those whose energies have been fed 

 and nursed by the winter storms that sweep along these rugged 

 hill tops ; but the fascinations that may have once tempted, the 

 love of ease and the hope of wealth, which are common to all 

 men, to such a land of promise, where the magnolia towers in 

 its beauty and the orange groves load the air with their fra- 

 grance, have been growing weaker and weaker as the character 

 of her "peculiar institution" has become better understood by 

 the people of the free States. To say nothing of its moral 

 and political effect, its influence upon the character of labor is 

 enough to render it odious if tried only by the test of political 

 economy. 



Labor has been made by Providence the law of man's condi- 

 tion ; it is the price at which whatever is valuable in life must 

 be earned ; and yet, though originally pronounced as a curse, 

 it becomes, under proper regulations, the surest source of pos- 

 itive blessings to man. In whatever field of honest effort it is 

 exercised, it brings with it, as its reward, the self-respect of 

 the laborer, as well as the respect of all true men with whom 

 he is associated. 



Whatever, therefore, degrades labor as the business of life, 

 or renders it distasteful or dishonorable, does violence to our 

 social laws no less than to a wise economy. If the labor of a 

 community is thrown, as a burden, upon a degraded class, — be 

 it the helots of Sparta, the slaves of Rome, or the slaves of the 

 Carolinas, — it becomes in itself a degraded pursuit, till the 

 masses of the community grow luxurious and corrupt, or idle 

 and degraded, themselves. They may boast of their chivalry 

 aud pure blood ; but the chivalry and blood of such a people 



