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and tEey can. They can make it as productive as Westers 

 prairies or Southern valleys. There is no reason why the ag- 

 riculture of New England should not rival that of Old Eng- 

 land. There is no reason why Massachusetts should not feed 

 her whole population. To make her truly independent she 

 should do so. The responsibility rests upon the rising gen- 

 eration of farmers. Let us hope that they will cheerfully 

 assume and nobly discharge it, 



A few words^ and but a few, upon one other topic, and- I 

 have done. You may call it, if you please, aesthetics, poetry^ 

 sentiment, by what name you will, but it is a subject upon 

 which, if I had felt at liberty to follow my own inclinations, I 

 should have filled my whole discourse. The young farmer 

 will mistake his mission who makes that an end which should 

 be but an incident or means. He may grow rich, may add 

 barn to barn, and acre to acre, but if he neglects to wreathe 

 the brow and soften the hands of labor with refinement and 

 grace, his whole life will be a failure, and his example a wrong. 

 Farming must be made attractive — and though its profitable 

 exercise will tend to this, yet if, through the want of other at- 

 tractions, it does not gain the right class of recruits, it will 

 soon cease to yield profit. Is not our farm-life too rugged and 

 harsh ? Has it sufficiently recognized the amenities of life ? 

 Has it adequately encouraged social culture and delights ? Has 

 it not deemed exclusive devotion to labor as indispensable to 

 success, frowned upon whatever interfered with unremitting toil, 

 and grudged the expended mite which would have added to its 

 hoards ? Has it not looked upon the exercise of taste, the 

 gratification of the eye, the love of ornament and beauty, a& 

 something foreign and out of place, and recognized nothing as 

 desirable or useful which would not pay in dollars and cents ? 

 Such, at all events, has been the prevailing tendency — and in 

 it is to be found the great secret of that aversion to farm-life 

 which "has taken directly from our farming population its 

 best elements — its quickest intelligence, its most stirring enter- 

 prise, its noblest and most ambitious natures." Let the young 



