51 



erate all the rest. Tiic same fact has held true in our own country, in the 

 war ol'tlie Revolution, and in the late war of the Rebellion. In the recent 

 struggle of arms tor the existence of the Government, when great cities fal- 

 tered and sent forth huge shadows of distrust and despondency, the inhabi- 

 tants of the rural districts bathed in the light of hope antl promise, and the 

 country interests and the country influences were on the side of war, and 

 expenditure, and freedom. Nor can I conceive that such will ever fail to 

 be the fact in every rural section whose people are under the mastery of 

 religion and intelligence. There is something in the steadiness of well- 

 educated agricultural connnunitics, in their surroundings, in their better 

 0}i[)ortunitics for rellection and conviction, in their more calm and equable 

 life, in the habitual religiosity and serenity of their occupation, in their 

 local attachments, which no other classes have so strongly, Avhich are a nur- 

 sery of character, and which isolate the owners and cultivators of the land 

 from the mere rage for money-getting that afflicts the intenser industries of 

 the State, — there is sometliing, which I need not define or explain, but 

 which anchors thes^e men and their families to just and enduring concep- 

 tions of their relations to their God, their race, and their countiy. If they 

 constituted the only class, I allow there Avould be a deficiency of enterprise 

 and a stationariness which would be fatal to public progress, as the ho- 

 mogenousness of the communities of China has abundantly illustrated. 

 But as a particular interest or class in the midst of others, as a balance- 

 wheel and checkmate to all the others, they are essential to a free, enlight- 

 ened, and independent Commonwealth. It is, therefore, in this sense and 

 this relation to the life of the State, that I characterize the agricultural 

 l)opulation of Massachusetts by applying to them the often repeated woi'ds 

 of the poet : — 



" A bold peasantry, their country's pride, 

 Which once destroyed, can never be supplied." 



But, then, we come back again to the fact, — which challenges my urgency 

 of the absolute necessity of keeping full, and well educated, a landed class 

 in Massachusetts, — that in the spread and development of the other inter- 

 ests this has come now to be only one sixth or one-seventh, numerically, in 

 the grand whole. I accept the fact. The agricultural class is not even 

 one sixtli in numbers in Great Britain, where its power transcends every 

 thing which tlie world beside can show. It is not necessary that it should 

 even he pro[)ortionately larger than it now is in our own Commonwealth, 

 if only its genius and capacity shall keep pace with the other dejiartments. 

 But that the class shall exist, and be fostered, and be educated up to the 

 highest standard of every other class, and that it shall retain, as a minority 

 in numbers and interest, as great a power as it now has with the majority, — 

 this is a State, public, political, social necessity, as it should also be a State 

 pride, and, it' need be, a State cost out of the Treasury. In common politics 

 a well supported minority is often as essential as the majority for public 



