affiliates him with the beasts he drives. The artist and man 

 of imagination, with face lialf-spiritualizcd, shows yet in that 

 face the deep uncertainties of his own living. And so of the 

 rest. But he who stands upon his own acres bares his brow 

 to heaven with another aspect. He stands nearer to a cer- 

 tainty. So far as human hands may hold it, the key of his 

 life and welfare is in his own grasp, and he knows it. And 

 thus he meets the world half-way ; able, if need be, to retire 

 to the fastness of his own economical home, and there defy 

 the besiegers. They may sit before his walls while they will ; 

 but the rain and the sunshine are his, and the earth, despite 

 of foes, shall give him always meat and drink in its season. 



To prove the husbandman the original freeman might seem 

 superfluous. The examples of the world and of history are 

 almost too many. The freest people of Europe have perched 

 themselves upon the Alps, where, though the cultivated crops 

 are slender, the true agricultural spirit leads them, with free 

 breath and step unfettered, to pasture their herds, and sing 

 their Ranz des Vaches on the grassy slopes of Mount Rhigi 

 and the Matterhorn. And shall we not recognize the fact, 

 that those time-honored stern barons of England, who gave 

 such resistless dicta to King John that he ground the chips of 

 the wayside between his teeth for rage when he dared not 

 deny them, — shall we not recognize in them the hmded agri- 

 culturists of that day, and the progenitors of those whose in- 

 fluence has since turned that laud into a garden of fruitful- 

 ness, and her laws into institutions of liberty? 



I anticipate here an objection. It iias been repeatedly said, 

 for years past, that our Southern States stood, as an agricul- 

 tural community, opposed in nature to the manufacturing 

 people of the North. Indeed, all will remember the boast of 



