DEVOTED TO AGiUOTJLTURE AUD ITS KINDRED ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



VOL. XIV. 



BOSTON, JULY, 1862. 



NO. 7. 



XOURSE, EATOX & TOLMAX, Proprietors. 

 Office... .100 Washington Street. 



SIMOX BROWX EniTOE. 



HEXRY F. FREXCPI, Associate Editor. 



/ L- — — — generally is 



^^*y Kjvf^ \\ liie case m Ji,ur( 



V- T^a''''^L \ ^H'foie its nai 

 t^p\ ' '^^ cl an-ed in hone 

 y^W^ ' / great C esar, July was ca; 



JULY. 



Loud is the summer's busy song, 



The smallest breeze can fiml a tongue 



While insects of each tiny size 



Grow teazing with th'-ir melodies, 



Till noon burns with its blistering breath 



Around, and day lies still as death. jonv fT art 



ULY is a busy time 

 with the farmers 

 of New England. 

 It is the great hay- 

 ing season here, as 

 it is also with the 

 farmers in many 

 countries of the old 

 ^ world. Indeed, so 

 this 

 the case m Europe, that, 

 name was 

 lonor of the 

 great C esar, July was called Ileu- 

 Cv-^i I Vfionat, or the mowing month, a 

 *,v^ name far more appropriate, it would 

 " seem, than one -which was chosen 



merely to honor an individual whose 

 birth is said to have occurred in this 

 month. 

 If any thing could perpetuate a man's 

 memory, or confer immortality upon a hu- 

 mon being, surely to have his name borne down 

 to posterity by one of the twelve months of the 

 rolling year must be sufficient. But hoM' signally 

 has even this f:\iled ! Though the name of July 

 is borne by the seventh month, how few of the 

 living millions who speak or write that word are 

 reminded of the dead monarch from whose title it 

 was originally taken! Poor old Julius Ctesar, 

 though your name may be pronounced by our 

 lips or written by our pens, it has no power to 

 "keep your memory green" in our hearts. It does 

 not remind us of you, but of a certain round of 

 work -which has become associated in our minds 

 with July — prominent amons: which are the labors 



of the hay-field, with the management of the 

 mowing machine, the horse rake, &c. &c., which 

 are doing the drudgery, among us, that was per- 

 formed by the human machines Avhich, under 

 taskmasters, gathered the harvests of old Rome, 

 in your day, most noble July-us ! 



And this suggests a pleasant practictil tnougnt 

 — tlie missiun of machinery. We say a pleasant-, 

 thought, because, in the first place, we look uponi 

 macliinery as the most effective of all emancipa^- 

 tors. "Slavery and the slave trade," says Baa- 

 croft, "are older than the records of human soei- 

 ety ;" yet both historj' and observation show that 

 slave labor has always been, and still is, confined 

 to that class of work which requires physical 

 strength rather than mental energy, or ta those 

 kinds of service which may be constantly s.uperin- 

 tended by master and mistress, or by their hired 

 overseers. Slaves have never been, to any extent, 

 employed in any branch ol business in which cal- 

 culation, thought, foresight or responsibility are 

 . necessary. Tliis principle is so well understood, 

 and so generally acted upon by slaveholders, that 

 laws have been enacted to prohibit the education 

 of slaves, and, even in our own country, women 

 have been imprisoned for teaching slaves their let- 

 ters ! No, slaves are machines, and when their 

 tasks can be more promptly and cheaply executed 

 by the soulless engine, then, indeed, shall the op- 

 pressed go free. Slave labor, already driven from 

 the manufacturing centres of the world, seems to 

 have made its last stand on the broad fields of the 

 plantation. A machine once introduced there, 

 that shall harvest cotton as the McCormick on- 

 Buckeye does -wheat, would soon Avhistle the- 

 death-knell of human servitude, provided the "ne- 

 cessities of war" do not anticipate the inevitable 

 destiny of hot air and steam. 



In the second place, it is pleasant for us to think 

 of machinery as the improver and elevator of the 

 laboring classes generally. Especially at this sea- 

 son of the vear. when the phvsical system is weak- 



