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is her position before the world to-day, in the time when dis- 

 honesty and brazen robbery have almost their own way, and 

 more is written and printed upon financial criminality than 

 was upon the breadth of the civil war a dozen years ago ? 

 What shall we say less than this, that the robbers and embez- 

 zlers, the rogues, burglars and defaulters, have not been found 

 amowj her followers I We will not overpraise the farmer ; 

 but there is something about his calling that keeps him, ap- 

 parently, out of, and aloof from, most of such criminalities 

 as these. Wliat it is, you can say as Avell as I ; but certain 

 it is, that this infection has broken out, specially, rather 

 among the classes that cannot afford to wait for gain to grow 

 by any natural seedtime and harvest, but thirsting, like Orto- 

 grul of Basra, for that golden stream which is quick and vio- 

 lent, have broken away from the trammels of the even life of 

 the husbandman, and thrown themselves into the vortex of 

 speculation, high contract, and jobbery. A purely spirited 

 agriculture is too good a friend to honesty to satisfy such ; 

 they turn their backs on the farms of inner New England, 

 and, pressing into the cities and greater towns, seek for that 

 fevery meat that alone can answer the appetite of a Tweed or 

 a Winslow. I say that the fact that husbandry owns almost 

 none among such misdoers, is enough to raise more than a 

 presumption that the field and the pasturage are not good 

 soils in which to grow a first-class rascality. The motive to 

 all this obliquity seems, mostly, to be a restless haste for pre- 

 mature wealth ; but the atmosphere of the farm is, doubtless, 

 always rather that of contentment. There is meanness 

 enough, usury enough, hard bargaining enough, among the 

 agriculture of our country ; but it does not tempt the cupidity 

 of man like the brokers' board or the stock oflice. The nar- 



