186 farmers' ajjd mechanics' journal. 



THE PLEASURES OF AGRICULTURE, 



In free countries, are more, and in enslaved, fewer, than the 

 pleasures of most other employments. The reason of it is, that 

 agriculture both from its nature, and also as being generally the 

 employment of a great portion of a nation, cannot be united with 

 power, considered as an exclusive interest. It must of course be 

 enslaved, wherever despotism exists, and its masters will enjoy 

 more pleasures in that case, than it can ever reach. On the con- 

 trary, where power is not an exclusive, but a general interest, agri- 

 culture can employ its own energies for the attainment of its own 

 happiness. 



Under a free government it has before it, the inexhaustible 

 sources of human pleasure, of fitting ideas to substances, and sub- 

 stances to ideas; and of a constant rotation of hope and fruition. 



The novelty, frequency and exactness of accommodations be- 

 tween our ideas and operations, constitutes the most exquisite 

 source of mental pleasure. Agriculture feeds it with endless sup- 

 plies in the natures of soils, plants, climates, manures, instruments 

 of culture and domestic animals. Their combinations are inex- 

 haustible, the novelty of results is endless, discrimination and 

 adaptation are never idle, and an unsatiated interest receives grati- 

 fications in quick succession. 



Benevolence is so closely associated with this interest, that its 

 exertion in numberless instances, is necessary to foster it. Libe- 

 rality in supplying its laborers with the comforts of life, is the best 

 sponsor for the prosperity of agriculture, and the practice of almost 

 every moral virtue is amply remunerated in this world, whilst it is 

 also the best surety for attaining the blessings of the next. Poetry, 

 in allowing more virtue to agriculture, than to any other profession, 

 has abandoned her privilege of fiction, and yielded to the natural 

 moral effect of the absence of temptation. The same fact is com- 

 memorated by religion, upon an occasion of the most solemn, with- 

 in the scope of the human imagination. At the awful day of judg- 

 ment, the discrimination of the good from the wicked, is not made 

 by the criterion of sects or of dogmas, but by one which consti- 

 tutes the daily employment and the great end of agriculture. The 

 iudge upon this occasion, has by anticipation pronounced, that to 

 feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and give drink to the thirsty, 

 are ihe passports to future happiness ; and the divine intelligence 

 which selected an agricultural slate as a paradise for its first 

 favorites, has here again prescribed the agricultural virtues as the 

 means for the admission of their posterity into heaven. 



With the pleasures of religion, agriculture unites those of patri- 

 otism, and among the worthy competitors for pre-eminence in the 

 practice of this cardinal virtue, a profound author assigns a high 

 station to him who has made two blades of grass grow instead of 

 one ; an idea capable of a signal amplification, by a comparison 

 between a system of agriculture which doubles the fertility of a 

 country, and a successful war which doubles its territory. By the 

 first, the territory itself is also substantially doubled, without wast- 



