AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 116 



The ocean is covered witli our grains, seeking to empty their 

 heavy bags at the feet of our creditors. 



We are, therefore, compelled to appreciate the importance 

 of the tillage of the soil. It underlies all the other avocations 

 of men, as their basis and sub-stratum. Like the primal rock, 

 whose gigantic ribs and bones sustain the waters and their Heets, 

 the fertile ground and its array of verdure, the lordly tree and 

 modest tiower, man and his mansions, — so agriculture upholds 

 all other employments, and provides the foundation, too often 

 forgotten, on whicli they are erected. It is the fuel that feeds 

 them all. It gives motive power to the great locomotive of 

 human achievement. Without its aid, mortal activities would 

 stagnate and die. Art w^ould sink into the dust; science stop 

 in its triumphal demonstrations; commerce languish and expire; 

 and every avenue pursued by human enterprise, now margined 

 with beauty, covered and lost under the arid sands of the desert. 

 The merchant sends his stately argosies abroad, and, with far- 

 seeing vision, considers how the wants of one people may be 

 supplied by the productions of another; and yet he interchanges 

 but the results of agriculture in their original or modified forms. 

 If he brings over the waves the aromatic leaf of China, the 

 coveted berry of Java, or the spices of the Indian isles, he but 

 supplies our w^ants with the tillage of the Orient. If his glad 

 ship is freighted with the golden and mellow fruits of the Medi- 

 terranean, she yet spreads her canvass in the service of Pomona. 

 Whether cocoa or the almond, grapes or figs, cotton or tobacco, 

 flour or wool, meats or mahogany, appear upon his manifest, he 

 is yet transporting substances which derive existence from the 

 nurture of the soil. Nay, though his invoice may register only 

 the products of the loom, — whatever form the fabric may assume 

 — he traces back the origin of his cargo to the i^roliflc earth, 

 mingled, though it may have been, with mechanical, as well as 

 agricultural labor. 



Unless a large portion of our race shall devote its time, indus- 

 try, and skill, with needful appliances, and due regard to seed- 

 time and harvest, in constantly inviting the good old earth to 

 pour its energies through branch and stem into the yellow grain 

 or rounded fruit, starvation, or at best a lean and scanty sub- 

 sistence, would await humanity, and check, at once, all eflfbrt 

 and aspiration. The muscles of the smith's arm, growing flabby 

 and diminished, could no longer wield the ponderous sledge. 

 The last human habitation would have been reared, and mason, 



