brought in ships to fertilize his lands. Probably there is 

 not a farmer in Massachusetts who could keep himself alive 

 by farming on his present system, without drawing upon ex- 

 ternal resources. It is with the farmer as with other classes 

 of men, liis advancement in his vocation is proportionate to 

 the extent he is aided by other employments. The advance- 

 ment of society is always marked by increasingly diversified 

 mutuality of social dependence. This is the law of prog- 

 ress. It is but the manifestation in the larger relations of 

 life, of the principle of the division of labor, that in pro- 

 portion as men become civilized, their pursuits should be 

 diversified. The traditional ascription to the farmer of a 

 peculiar social independence is derived from a state of so- 

 ciety existing in Massachusetts within the recollection of 

 persons here present, when the wool and flax grown by him 

 were spun and woven into garments by his household, 

 and the crops were mainly consumed on the farm upon which 

 they were raised. But independence like this is the inde- 

 pendence of an undeveloped social life, one that is still found, 

 though in a ruder form in the log cabins upon our Western 

 frontier, one that increases as man departs from civilization, 

 and reaches its extreme limit in the American Indian and 

 the African Hottentot. The higher the organization of social 

 life, the more each works for all, and all for each, and in so 

 doing, each works most efficiently for himself; the deeper and 

 tenderer too, becomes the sentiment of a common humanity 

 that pervades all classes. 



It was agriculture that established the fixed condition 

 of life and the possibility of the minute division and dis- 

 tribution of employments. But mechanical and manufac- 

 turing industry, when thus established as distinct depart- 

 ments of labor, reacts at once upon agriculture and gives it 

 a new and rapid development. It creates the demand for a 

 surplus of food to sustain the mechanic who no longer sup- 

 plies himself. As the proportion of society devoted to agricul- 

 ture diminishes, its efficiencv must be strengthened. From 



