ri 



sure he lives about as measerly a life as can be lived out of 

 politics. But when a man has his farm paid for, and a little 

 reserve in the savings bank, and appreciates his wife's 

 flower garden, and loves his country and his church, you 

 need not doubt that he is about as near being a king as 

 we can suffer any one to be in our Republic outside of our 

 Peabody " Kingdom." 



" No better proof o£ real gain," says Whittier in the 

 same letter from which I have quoted, " can be found than 

 the creation of pleasant homes for the comfort of age and 

 the happiness of youth. When the great English critic, 

 Mattliew Arnold, was in the country, on returning from a 

 visit in Essex County, he remarked that, while the land 

 looked to hira rough and unproductive, the landlords' 

 houses seemed neat and often elegant, with an air of pros- 

 perity about them. ^But where,' he asked, 'do the ten- 

 ants, the working people live ? ' He seemed surprised 

 when I told him that the tenants were the landlords, and- 

 the workers the owners." After such a discerninof recosr- 

 nition of the comparatively high and genuine prosperity of 

 the farming interest of Essex County, every farmer in our 

 community has the right to feel a new dignity and courage 

 in his calling. 



It is not for me, if it is for any one, to conjecture what 

 agricultural possibilities are latent in this county. We 

 are told, by accredited scientists, that our mineral soil is 

 the most easily renewed of any on the continent. When 

 the rich vegetable soil of large sections of the West is once 

 exhausted, its fertility cannot be renewed for generations. 

 It is not impossible that the essential agriculture of the 

 nation may yet devolve on the Atlantic slope, and Essex 

 county may find itself able to provide the general suste- 

 nance which now so abundantly comes from the West. The 

 six staple crops of this county, as this society has virtually 

 determined, are onions, cabbages, corn, potatoes, squashes 

 and turnips. There must be in due time, other available 



