wine of Europe. If some extreme temperance person here, should call me in 

 question for this allusion, 1 would say that eider is not an intoxicating drink. 

 In my youthful days, it was got into our cellars, live, ten or twenty barrels of 

 it, and it was on tap to the whole house ; and I never heard of but one man, 

 who was intoxicated by it ; and his case was so marked that he went among us 

 by the name of "cider Johnson." 



But to return to the point I was considering — why should making and selling 

 broad-cloth and calico, salt and kerosene, be thought more attractive than the 

 care of a farm ? Farming is a more varied employment ; it is not so monoto- 

 nous as work in factories and shops. It may be harder at times ; but it is not 

 so unintermitting ; there is more leisure in it — leisure of rainy days and of the 

 winter season. And then, the results are surer ; it is a more certain support for 

 a family. It has its anxieties: but no panic invades it, to scatter the gains of 

 half a life. Farmers do not fail. To be sure, they do not make fortunes : yet 

 few do that in any business. But the body of them are better off, than the 

 body of those who work in factories or marts or mines. And finally, for the 

 products, — neither silken fabrics nor costly furniture, nor gems nor gold, can 

 compare in beauty, with acres of corn, the most splendid of vegetable growths, 

 with waving grain-fields and rich meadows, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. 



I do not mean to make any romance of farming. There is a great deal of 

 hard work in it; but so there is in every thing that is thoroughly and well done. 

 1 only say that no fabrics, no furnished warehouses show anything so beautiful 

 as that which springs from the farmer's hand. And I am tempted to say, that 

 his especially is a religious calling. He who makes or sells goods, he who tends 

 the spinning jenny, or chips all day with the adz, or builds a house, has enough 

 in his work, it is true, to remind him of a Power beyond his own ; but he who 

 plants or sows the seed, looks for the springing of that which comes immedi- 

 ately from the hand of God. He does not make it — he does not make wheat 

 or corn — as a man makes a house or a locomotive. And all around him are the 

 sunshine and the showers, the hills and valleys and countless forms of animal 

 life, which the devout naturalist studies, as manifestations of the Power divine. 



But 1 find myself passing, in this observation, from material to mental farm- 

 culture. I mean the culture of the mind. I will confine myself, in what I 

 have further to say, to this point. I have preached a great deal in my life, but 

 I will not preach now. Preaching, in my account, takes hold of themes of 

 infinite moment ; and you would not think it strange, perhaps, if an old man 

 said something of that which is his last life-interest and support. But passing 

 by this, which you all know too, I will speak of that which may help the gen- 

 eral intelligence of our rural population, and also of that which, in my opin- 

 ion, most hinders it. 



And that, I think, which hinders it more than anything else, is isolation. 

 The factory, the trading-house have the advantage in this. Men are brought 

 together in them : they talk together ; they talk of what they read in news- 

 papers or in books ; in manufacturing places when evening comes, they are not 

 solitary, as men are in f aim-houses ; and I suspect that for this sole reason, the 

 body »f manufacturers and traders, are more intelligent than the body of farm- 



