MR. gray's address. 25 



ton and Jefferson and Adams were farmers, Van Buren is 

 a farmer ; and last, not least, he who has been so lately 

 elevated to the highest station in the gift of a free people, 

 and whose sudden departure to the world of spirits has 

 clothed our nation with sackcloth, was styled by way of 

 eminence, the farmer of ISorth Bend. 



There is not much danger, gentlemen, that agriculture 

 itself will ever become unfashionable, however unskil- 

 fully it may be conducted, and whatever grounds there 

 may be to despise it ; so long as it is fashionable to eat, 

 it will be foshionable to till the soil. Agriculture becom- 

 ing unfashionable! you might as well suppose that cloth- 

 ing amidst the storms of winter, would become unfash- 

 ionable. Fashion, however, has great power with young 

 men, and if the employment is not fashionable among 

 that class, the course which we have suggested will tend 

 to remove this prejudice from their minds. It will tend 

 to make the farming community, what their independent 

 position qualifies them to be, the true aristocracy of the 

 land. Why should they not be? There are iq\w of the so 

 called aristocracy of our cities, who can go back three gen- 

 erations without finding their fathers following the plough 

 in some obscure nook in the mountains. We have no 

 privileged class, unless it be the farmer. " He whom 

 nature at his birth endowed with noble qualities, tho' an 

 Ethiop and a slave, is nobly born." 



Dismiss, then, from your minds the idea that agricul- 

 ture is an employment beneath your faculties, and exert 

 yourselves to elevate it in the estimation of the commu- 

 nity. By the best informed, the truly great minds, it has 

 never been so regarded. It is among those who are not 

 certain of the estimation in which they are held, and who 

 are striving to elevate themselves from the lowest plebeian 

 to the patrician ranks, that the feelings which are here 

 discountenanced are most commonly indulged. Let it 

 attain to such perfection and periiianency, that whoever 

 cherishes such feelings, shall afford the most convincing 

 evidence of a weak mind, a small brain, a retreating fore 

 head, an ignoble origin. 



So far is agriculture from being an undesirable profes- 

 4 



