MR. stone's address. 35 



ground. If false notions and wrong practices exist in society, 

 let them be met and removed by the correct views and right 

 practices of Christianity. Practical Christianity, divested of 

 mysticism and superstition, is the true remedy for all the ills of 

 the social state. If men look into its pure ethics, they will learn 

 that avarice is sin, and selfishness antagonism with God. They 

 will learn that true living consists in subordinating the passions 

 — m^oderating the desires — abjuring the servitude and idolatry 

 of fashion — cultivating the social relations — and esteeming Mind 

 of more worth than Matter, and Heaven more desirable than 

 Earth. Let these truths be reduced to practice by both sexes, 

 and justice will be done to the moral, physical and intellec- 

 tual natures. Time will be so rightly divided, that labor, rest, 

 recreation and intellectual culture will each occupy its due 

 proportion, and a healthy equilibrium be maintained. 



There is one view, gentlemen, in which your profession as- 

 sumes an immense importance — greater, even, than that aris- 

 ing from the capacity of our soil to produce food for the whole 

 world. 1 mean its ability to control the destiny of our country. 

 Agriculture is essentially conservative. Its interests are so 

 blended with all other productive interests of this Nation, that 

 it can never encourage sudden and radical changes of policy, 

 calculated to injure them. If the time ever was, it has gone 

 by, when Agriculture can be severed from Manufactures and 

 Commerce — the parent from the children — or be arrayed in op- 

 position to them It must, in the nature of things, if true to it- 

 self, sympathize with what is American in principle and policy. 



There are three evils to which agriculture is exposed, the 

 suppression or prevention of which is essential to its prosperi- 

 ty. I mean Intemperance, Slavery, and War. Humanity 

 weeps over the degradation and crime, of which inebriation has 

 been the prolific cause. Sir Matthew Hale, in speaking of 

 twenty years judicial experience, says, that " if all the mur- 

 ders and manslaughters, burglaries, rapes, robberies, riots, tu- 

 mults, and other great enormities, commited within that time, 

 were divided into five parts, four of them would be found to 

 have been the result of intemperance." The criminal calendar 

 of our own country exhibits equally appalling results. And 



