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influence in continuous field labors, early and late, in summer's 

 heat and Avinter's cold, that tends to dull the brain, make it slug- 

 gish — some physical influence unfavorable to mental activity. In 

 illustration of this view it is asserted that hard working farmers, 

 as soon as they leave off work to rest, are more irresistibly over- 

 come by sleep than other classes of workers, have shorter and 

 less wakeful evenings, and of course, are less inclined and less 

 able to fill up their leisure hours with reading or vigorous thinking. 

 I have even heard it remarked that a Sunday congregation com- 

 posed mostly of farmers, will have more numerous and sounder 

 sleepers in it, than a congregation composed more of mechanics 

 or merchants, not wilfully or by their own fault, but because when 

 they stop to rest, their brain is overcome by an unconquerable 

 stupor induced by the nature of their occupations. 



This theory of the deteriorating efi'ect of agricultural labor is a 

 favorite one with the apologists for slavery, enabling them to 

 maintain that the degraded mental condition of plantation slaves 

 is not owing to their being slaves, nor wholly to alleged inferiority 

 of race, but to the necessary influence of field-work, continued 

 through a lifetime and from generation to generation. 



Our opponents, whether those who represent the interests of the 

 slave-system, or those who represent the interests of the old 

 world aristocratic system, avail themselves of this theory, to 

 justify their prediction of the sure decay and final downfall of our 

 free-labor and democratic polity. Your field workers, they say, 

 must by the nature of their employment, gravitate towards the 

 peasant condition. And the peasantry, black or white, all the 

 world over, have been, or have become, ignorant, stupid, brutal, 

 incompetent to rule, needing to be ruled. When your working 

 farmers, i. e. the bulk of your population, shall have reached this 

 condition, their rule will be insufierable, and there is the end of 

 your institutions. 



To these prophecies of evil, in which the wish is father to the 

 thought, Ave reply — Look around, look at the facts. Do we not 

 continually meet with practical hard-working farmers, who are 

 among the most intelligent, well-informed men, the most acute and 

 vigorous thinkers, that we find in any class ? And the great 

 agricultural masses are not found to be the peril but the stay 



