ierprises and trade accumtilate wealth in the hands of a few, the taahy are aJDit 

 to lose their state in society. Then the few can buy up the powers, by buying 

 the votes or paying the poll tax of the many. Then the ballot betoraes a boo- 

 merang, and turns to wound the highest interests of civilization. Would we 

 preserve the New England political purity of olden time, we must cultivate the 

 methods of New England equality. We must attach our young men to the soil 

 by the ties of a home. Small farms and homesteads, however humble, are the 

 bulwarks of national virtue and power. In this view agriculture as a profes- 

 sion rises to the rank of a moral, aye a religious influence ; for religion Ih its 

 primary sense means a binding together. We have irrevocably given suffrage^ 

 Let us make the voter conservative. When I contemplate the masses of able- 

 bodied young men who leave the manly pursuits of agriculture to sell tape and 

 needles behind the counters of city shops ; when I read the frightful list of nearly 

 two hundred millions of dollars of bankrupt debts per annum lost in trade for the 

 last few years; when I see the fair and frail armies of country- bred girls who 

 are getting a precarious and perilous living in our cities, and I reflect upon their 

 total ignorance of household arts on which a husband's comfort and the welfare 

 of a family must depend ; 1 turn with unmingled satisfaction to the evidence 

 given in the agricultural report of Massachusetts, that skilled mechanics have 

 found it profitable to abandon a trade and settle upon and reclaim a few acres 

 of cheap land to make a home free of rent and certain of food. Want of shel- 

 ter and the plainest food is the cry of anguish among our city poor to-day. Men 

 are starving, and a town farm to employ them in agricultural labor would be 

 charity and education. Carlysle says, in his quaint fashion, "Britain contains 

 forty millions of people, mostly fools." And when I see every day in Boston 

 and New York the suffering of men and women for the day's morsel of food 

 that a single hill of corn on four square feet of land in their country homes 

 would supply, I can hardly believe that item of the census of the state which 

 records that there are only thirty "asses" in Massachusetts. Of the men who 

 seek a fortune in other than agricultural pursuits, more than ninety per cent, 

 reap the agony of financial misfortune. As I read the record of disappoint- 

 ment, aye, the pangs of hunger often in their faces, I feel that Alexander Pope 

 never wrote wiser lines than those remarkable verses which he penned at ten 

 years of age : 



"Happy the man whose wish and care 

 A tew paternal acres bound; 



Content to breathe his native air 

 In his own ground. 



Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, 

 Whose flocks supply him with attire, 



Whose trees in summer yield him shade. 

 In winter, fire." 



The principal drawback that I can conceive of is that you may sometimes 

 have to listen to an agricultural address. 



