22 



extent of his possessions. The farmers of Massachusetts form a 

 class, the value and importance of which are hardly felt till they 

 have ceased to exist. In some countries of Europe they have 

 ceased to exist ; and their extinction is regretted by sound pohti- 

 cal thinkers as a misfortune. They form the basis on which the 

 fabric of social order may be most securely reared. The spirit of 

 radicalism may erect its menacing crest in our cities and large 

 towns, demagogues may be loud and voluble -wherever crowds can 

 gather to hear them, but so long as the soil of Massachusetts is 

 occupied by small proprietors, cultivating the lands they own, we 

 have a conservative element in our society which may quiet the 

 most uneasy alarmist. They keep the ship in trim ; and though 

 she may take a lurch now and then, she will not go over. 



And now I have done all that I proposed to do. I have pre- 

 sented some considerations which should make the farmers of Mas- 

 sachusetts contented with their lot. Starting with the admission 

 that the soil is not of remarkable and exuberant fertility, I have 

 endeavored to illustrate that great law of compensation which runs 

 through the whole scheme of Divine Providence, by showing that 

 the causes which make the soil what it is, give us other natural 

 advantages not otherwise to be had, so that what is lost in one way 

 is gained in another. And so far as man's relation to the land is 

 concerned, I have shown — and it is an obvious truth — that the 

 position of the Massachusetts farmer is one of peculiar dignity and 

 desirableness : I mean peculiar, in comparison with the whole civ- 

 ilized world. His brethren of the rest of New England, and of the 

 Northern States, generally, share with him in this advantage. And 

 the moral I would draw from my discourse — the improvement, 

 as an old fashioned minister would call it — is this : let the young 

 man who has resolved to become a farmer, also resolve to stay 

 at home. He will hear wonderful stories of the boundless fertili- 

 ty of the West : how the wind of the level prairie waves the deep- 

 bosomed grain for hundreds and thousands of acres, and the yel- 

 low harvest runs up to the blue line of the sky ; but let him hear 

 it unmoved. There they have no mountains : there they have no 

 sea : the two grand voices of Nature are silent there. Those 

 corn-bearing plains are the prose of earth and not its poetry : and 

 the imagination languishes and dies amid those Avastes of fertility. 



