39 



and the clicker, with the spindle and the loom, I find 

 myself confronted by a society which has made agricul- 

 ture keep pace wath the other pursuits, which has blend- 

 ed the element of progress with the element of stability, 

 and which, sitting in the shadow of the name of its ear- 

 ly benefactor, Timothy Pickering, surveys and judges 

 calmly the busy scene of life, welcoming that which is 

 good, and rejecting that which is not essential, 



I cannot help thinking that on many accounts your 

 circumstances are felicitous. They have surely proved 

 felicitous for your own profit and contentment, and I 

 must regard them as equally fortunate in furnishing to 

 others an illustration and a model worthy of study, and 

 in a great measure worthy of copying. The conditions 

 and relations of industry in Essex present an example 

 which is full of suggestions to all communities that 

 would be prosperous and happy. They show a people 

 who are devoted exclusively neither to agriculture nor 

 to manufactures, nor to the mechanic arts ; but they ex" 

 hibit a community wdiich is proportionately devoted to 

 each and all of these. And it is, perhaps, the happiest 

 circumstance of all the array of facts before us, that 

 while the intense and absorbing growth of your manu- 

 factures has overshadowed the more modest and patient 

 pursuit of cultivating the land, yet they all render to- 

 day, and on every occasion, their grateful obeisance and 

 homage to agriculture — which is patriarchal and parent- 

 al — which is always first and which can never become 

 secondary. As the sons in a modern family, who have 

 gone beyond the aspirations of their ancestors, and have 

 successfully extended their enterprize over adventurous 

 fields of which their fathers never dreamed, still date all 

 success from the fountain head of the virtues of the 



