make in that case.

This is what they are already doing in manufactures, and by the process I have indicated.

I think that there is no lack of schools and seminaries and professorships, adapted and qualified for advancing and disseminating agricultural science. Our present seminaries and the teachers. of natural science in them, are quite sufficient; and text-books, guides to experiment, and laboratories, are not wanting in the country. What then is wanting? Only pupils. The students in all our seminaries, intent on-not agricultural pursuits, but what are called the learned or liberal professions-rush by the agricultural chair, to attend to instructions in mathematics, rhetoric, and classical literature. Certainly the professor ceases to explore for new acquisitions, when no one will listen to his expositions of what he already has. A desire to communicate to others, is always combined with the passion for the pursuit of knowledge.

Why then are there no pupils? The fault-again I pray you -pardon my boldness-the fault is chiefly with the farmers themselves. A farm, of course, is necessary to him who is to be a farmer. Generally, only farmers' sons have or expect farms, and so they are the class who must supply the candidates for the profession of farming. But the farmers' sons are generally averse from scientific study. There is a general prejudice that agriculture is a simple, easy art or trade, which can be taken up and practised without academic instruction or systematical apprenticeship, and that theoretic precepts serve only to mislead and bewilder.

On the contrary, Nature has left all the human faculties in one sense incomplete, to be perfected by general education and by training for special and distinct pursuits. She has left those faculties not less incomplete, and without adaptation, in the farmers' case than in any other. Her laws are general and inflexible. Brutes only have perfect instincts. Man can do nothing well, and indeed can do nothing at all, but by the guidance of cultivated reason. Notwithstanding admitted differences of natural capacity, and of tastes and inclinations, it is nevertheless practically and generally true, that success, and even distinction and eminence, in any vocation, are proportioned to the measure of culture, training, industry, and perseverance brought into exercise. So he will be the best farmer, and even the best woods

man or well-digger, as he will be the best lawyer, the greatest hero, or the greatest statesman, who shall have studied most widely and most profoundly, and shall have labored most carefully and most assiduously.

There is another prejudice even more injurious than that which I have thus exposed. The farmer's son is averse from the farmer's calling. He does not intend to pursue it, and is always looking for some gate by which to escape from it. The prejudice is hereditary in the farm-house. The farmer himself is not content with his occupation; nor is the farmer's wife any more so. They regard it as an humble, laborious, and toilsome one; they continually fret about its privations and hardships, and thus they unconsciously raise in their children a disgust toward it. Is not this at least frequently so? Is there a farmer here who does not desire, not to say seek, to procure for his son a cadet's or midshipman's warrant, a desk in the village lawyer's office, a chair in the physician's study, or a place behind the counter in the country store, in preference to training him to the labors of the farm? I fear that there is scarcely a farmer's son who would not fly to accept such a position, or a farmer's daughter who would not prefer almost any settlement in town or city, to the domestic cares of the farm-house and the dairy.

Whence is this prejudice? It has come down to us from ages of barbarism. In the savage state, agricultural labor is despised, because bravery in battle, and skill in the chase, must be encouraged; and so heroism is still requisite for the public defence in the earlier stages of civilization, and the tiller of the soil, therefore, rises slowly from the condition of a villein, a serf, or a slave. Nevertheless, ancient, and almost universal, as this prejudice is, I am sure that it is unnatural to mankind in ripened civilization, such as that at which we have arrived. Of all classes of men, we practically have the least need of hunters; and we employ very few soldiers, while the whole structure of society hinges on the agricultural interest. A taste, nay, a passion for agriculture, is inherent and universal among men. The soldier or the sailor cares little for learning, mechanism, or music; but the solaces of his weary watchings and his midnight dreams are recollections. and hopes of a cottage-home. The merchant's anxieties and the lawyer's studies are prosecuted patiently for the ultimate end of graceful repose in a country-seat; and lunatics, men and women,

are won back to the sway of reason by the indulgence of labor in the harvest-field, and the culture of fruits and flowers in the gardens of the asylum.

I know that frivolous persons, in what is called fashionable society, who sleep till noon, still continue to depreciate and despise rural pursuits and pleasures. But what are the opinions of such minds worth? They equally depreciate and despise all labor, all industry, all enterprise, and all effort; and they reap their just reward in weariness of themselves, and in the contempt of those who value human talents, not by the depth in which they are buried, but by the extent of their employment for the benefit of mankind.

The prejudice, however, must be expelled from the farmer's fireside and the farmer and his wife must do this themselves. It is as true in this case as in the more practical one which the rustic poet had in view :

"The wife too must husband, as well as the man;

Or farewell thy husbandry, do what thou can."

Let them remember, that, in well-constituted and highly-advanced society like ours, intellectual cultivation relieves men from labor, but it does not at all exempt them from the practice of industry; on the contrary, it obliges the universal exercise of industry; and that, notwithstanding the current use of the figures of speech, "wearied limbs, sweating brows, hardened sinews, and rough and blackened hands," there is uo avocation in our country that rewards so liberally with health, wealth, and honor, a given application of well-directed industry, as does that of the farmer. If he is surpassed by persons in other pursuits, it is not because their avocations are preferable to his own, but because, while he has neglected education and training, they have taken care to secure both.

When these convictions shall have entered the farmhouse, its respectability and dignity will be confessed. Its occupants will regard their dwellings and grounds, not as scenes of irksome and humiliating labor, but as their own permanent home, and the homestead of their children and their posterity. Affections unknown before, and new-born emulation, will suggest motives to improvement, embellishment, refinement, with the introduction of useful and elegant studies and arts which will render the paternal roof, as it ought to be, attractive to the young, and the

farmer's life harmonious to their tastes and satisfactory to their ambition. Then the farmer's sons will desire and demand education as liberal as that now chiefly conferred on candidates for professional life, and will subject themselves to discipline, in acquiring the art of agriculture, as rigorous as that endured by those who apprentice themselves to other vocations.

Then, with the certain improvement of agriculture, we shall have the improvement and elevation of the agricultural class of American society. Have you considered how much that class renounce in denying themselves the self-improvement I have urged? Have you considered, that in practice they widely renounce the functions of representation in the conduct of the government in favor of other classes, no more privileged than their own? This is unnecessary, unwise, unsafe; indeed, it is not republican-it is not American. In nearly all civilized states, the farmers, or those who cultivated the soil, have constituted far the greater part of the population, The chief control of society and government, then, it would seem, should of right have been vested in them. Yet in truth, they have never, since the age of the patriarchs, attained any such control, except just here, and just now. In Great Britain they divide authority, but are overbalanced by merchants, manufacturers, and privileged classes. Notwithstanding modern constitutional concessions to them in France, they are nevertheless ruled there alternately by the city population and the army. In Germany, by the army. In parts of Italy, by the church; and in Russia they are slaves.

It has always been otherwise here. Farmers planted these colonies-all of them-and organized their governments. They were farmers who defied the British soldiery on Bunker Hill and drove them back from Lexington. They were farmers-aye, Vermont farmers, who captured the fortress at Ticonderoga, and accepted its capitulation in the name of the "Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress," and thus gave over the first fortified post to the cause of the Revolution. They were farmers who checked British power at Saratoga, and broke it in pieces like a potter's vessel at Yorktown. They were farmers who reorganized the several states and the federal government, and established them all on the principles of equality and affiliation. In every state, and in the whole Union, they constitute the broad electoral

faculty, and by their preponderating suffrages the vast and complex machine is perpetually sustained and kept in regular motion and operation. That it is in the main well administered, we all know by experienced security and happiness; that it might be better administered, our perpetual and intense passion for change fully proves; that it is administered no better, results from what? From the fact that the electoral body, the farmers, intelligent and patriotic as they are, may nevertheless become more intelligent and more patriotic than they now are. The more intelligent and patriotic they become, the more effective will be their control, and the wiser their direction of the government. Is there not room? Nay, is there not need for more activity, energy, and efficiency, on their part, for their own security and welfare? In the federal government commerce has its minister and department, the law its organ and representative, and the arts their commissioner and bureau. But the vast interest of agriculture has only a single desk and a subordinate clerk in the basement of the patent-office. It is scarcely better in the states. An empty charter of incorporation, with a scanty endowment, constitutes substantially all that has been anywhere done for agriculture. Gentlemen, I like not that it should be so. Our nation is rolling forward in a high career, exposed to shocks and dangers. It needs the utmost wisdom and virtue to guide it safely; it needs the steady and enlightened direction which, of all others, the farmers of the United States can best exercise, because, being freeholders invested with equal power of suffrage, they are at once the most liberal and the most conservative element in the country.

Let me urge this duty of self-improvement by a consideration of the nature of the great national crisis through which we are passing. One word describes it—expansion. Expansion within our borders, to people and organize not less than forty states, each as great and populous as those which now constitute the Union-expansion beyond our borders to bring in states more numerous than one dare to conjecture. Do you question the existence of this crisis? Recollect, then, how soon you have become familiar with the yet new states of Wisconsin, Iowa, Florida, Texas, and California; and how fast the territorial form of government, only preliminary to that of new states, is extended under names before unknown, in Minnesota, Oregon, New Mex