486 [Assembly 



Mr. President, — I ask the indulgence of this audience while I 

 glance at the subject in another point of view, which indeed fills my 

 mind with the deepest emotions. For, to me, it is a matter of in- 

 tense regret, that thousands of our young and vigorous farmers are 

 in a state of transition, leaving a fertile soil, salubrious climate, 

 literary and religious associations, homes where peace and plenty 

 dwell, and where labor receives a just and adequate reward, and 

 where frugality can rear her comfortable castle, enterprise find myriads 

 •of acres of new and available lands, and that, too, within the reach 

 of ordinary thrift, markets made by physical and artificial facilities 

 accessible to the mountain steeps and lowly dells j and all the arte- 

 ries of industry are gladdened and vivified by an active, joyous, and 

 moral people; for boundless and monotonous prairies, dark and in- 

 terminable forests, sluiijgish and turbid streams, dank and noxious 

 fens, lowly and confined cabins, exposure to the pestilential exhala- 

 tions of rank vegetation, subsisting at one time on scanty and un- 

 wholesome diet, anon on surfeited abundance, harassed with continu- 

 al toil and alarms, and beyond the pale of the beneficial teachings 

 of education and religion, their life is spent in glutted accumulations, 

 shortened by disease, ar.d rusts in dull uniformity. 



The story is not yet told. The ravages of disease will reach the 

 wife, announced in the trembling steps, in the down cast face and 

 shattered form: her ghostly eyes are slowly and wistfully turned 

 towards the green meadows and babbling brooks of that soil which 

 cleaves first and last in her memory. 



Even you see in her emaciated infants no vermilion in their cheeks, 

 and no elasticity in their motions, while the dull and imploring look 

 of the family circle proclaim the phrenzy of home-sickness and un- 

 utterable despair. 



Mr. President, — I should do violence to my own feelings, did not 

 I advert to this pleasing incident, that our presence has been this 

 evening honored with so respectable an attendance of the gentler 

 sex, an omen which may be deemed propitious to this great imder- 

 taking. For, if courtesy did not, truth would compel us to do 

 homage to those who are the earliest and firmest friends of what- 

 ever tends to ameliorate our species. And as an American, who has 

 been pained to Avitness their degradation in other climes, I may feel 

 justly proud of the intellectual and refined bearing of those to whom 

 is committed the sacred trust of budding and training the rising 

 hopes of the country. Delightful companions in the voyage' of life! 



