15 



it, the frosts will nip it. But relying on the great promise that 

 seed-time and harvest shall not fail, he can exert all his powers 

 to succeed in that conflict to which he was doomed, when the 

 decree went forth that in the sweat of his face should he eat 

 bread. 



In presenting this view of the agricultural effort of the present 

 as compared with the past, I find myself suddenly arrested and 

 called back to the tastes and traditions of the long line of hardy, 

 industrious and prosperous farmers from whom we sprung. We 

 must enter upon our new career, but we may not forget the laws 

 by which they subdued the earth, and which have gone into our 

 test-books of farming. We should not forget their modes of 

 cultivation, by which they raised extraordinary crops, nor their 

 attempts to improve the animals upon their farms. And we 

 should remember that it was they whose strength civilized these 

 hills, in whose hands the material prosperity of our State rested 

 half a century ago, whose ample abodes still remain in our vil- 

 lages and along our roadsides, whose social position was won 

 by solid merit, who constituted that intelligent rural population 

 from whom the merchants, and lawyers, and divines, and states- 

 men of our day have sprung, and whose homes are still waiting 

 a return of that w^ealth and intelligence which long ago deserted 

 them. In our busy and restless and ambitious life we have 

 poured om- best powers of mind and body into our cities and 

 towns, and exhausted them in the forum, or in the hard toil of 

 the inventive arts. We have forgotten too much the old rural 

 homes — those broad fields, those overshadowing trees, that sub- 

 stantial New England dwelling, whose very presence even now 

 tells of the staunch and reliable virtues of those who have long 

 since gone to their rest. We should know that the charm of 

 life is not in our cities and large towns. Neither our moral nor 

 our religious, nor our physical natures can be developed with 

 that beauty of proportion of which man is capable, so long as 

 we prefer the feverish excitement of the busy concourse of men, 

 to the healthy and refining influences of a cultivated rural life. 

 There are charms in the increasing current of life which flows 

 through the farm and the market-place. There is a fascination, 

 as Mr. Choate once said to me, " in the newspaper and the post- 

 office," above the quiet of a country life. But when we remem- 

 ber the annoyances which meet us at every corner, the petty 



