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The intelligence, ability and earnestness which it now organizes, 

 insure to it an increasing usefulness and a continuance of that 

 public confidence it has always deserved and received. Let it 

 enlarge the scope of its activity. Let it test its usages by 

 the standard of the highest utility. Let it be liberal to the 

 new thought and welcome all effective co-operation. Let it 

 concentrate its influence upon the vital points of a true agri- 

 cultural economy. Let its whole attitude bend towards the 

 future. Progress in agriculture is slow. But the tardiness of 

 its movement is compensated by being the ground of its pre- 

 eminence among all the pursuits of life. For its advancement 

 is the long-combining product of all the other arts and sciences. 

 The ripened agriculture is the last best fruit of time. The 

 ages labor to develope and perfect the consummate farmer, 

 and so restore to man his Paradise. 



But, fellow-citizens, our contemplations of the present and 

 our hopes for the future are solemnized by the thought of our 

 country and her perils. In four long years of desolating 

 strife, felt in all our homes, her fields have been the scenes 

 of the slow-evolving tragedy of war. It still goes on. It 

 is a war for country, freedom and the right, assailed by petty 

 domestic despots in arms to overthrow the government. A 

 war for the Union. Shall it be preserved? Shall self-re- 

 specting yeomen yield to masters who insultingly deny that 

 he who tills the soil is fit to own the soil he tills ? Shall 

 loyal owners of the land, tenacious of their rights, cleaving 

 to the patrimony saved and transmitted by their fathers, sur- 

 render in a single inch, between the Great Lakes and the 

 Gulf, the easements of nationality ? In this great cause that 

 seeks the judgment of the wise and just, shall Slavery pre- 

 vail — the gipsy thief that claimed with brazen lies America, 

 the child of Freedom, as her own, and yet would gleefully 

 cut with treason's knife the sacred body in twain amid the 

 shrieks of its true mother ? Shall any power of revolt be 

 suffered to break, or guilty compromise to unlock, the adaman- 

 tine clasp with which the constitution binds these states in 



