His wife, the lovely charmer!
The sweetest rose on all his lands-
The Independent Farmer.

To him the Spring comes dancingly,
To him the Summer blushes,
The Autumn smiles with yellow ray,
His sleep old Winter hushes.
He cares not how the world may move,
Nor doubts nor fears confound him;
His little flock are linked in love,

And household angels round him;
He trusts to God and loves his wife,
Nor griefs nor ills may harm her;
He's Nature's nobleman in life-
The Independent Farmer."

The isolated life of the farmer as well as his independence of position, begets self government and cherishes a love therefor. He first has from necessity to rule himself, look after his own family and his little kingdom, where he is patriarch, legislator, judge. Living on his own domains with his pastures, woodlands, hills and streams about him, with his children to be educated, he is supreme in his own little circle. He has none above him but God, and he receives his privileges and his rights from no human hand and hence never learns to look to another man as his superior. When others become his neighbors, they form the township, the county, and the State, continuing the same self-government when they have become an integral part of the great nation. Here is the beauty and perfection of our system of government—we have independent and self-constituted and self-controling circles within the greater circle. The parent has rights that the selectmen of the town may not question; the town has rights that the State may not invade; the State has rights that are beyond the reach of Congress, and which the President cannot disregard without committing treason against the commonwealth, as much as would the State if it should deny the powers that have been ceded to the general government in the constitution.

All history furnishes illustrations of the truth of our position, that an independent yeomanry is the basis of free institutions. Whenever a people have succeeded in republican forms of government, or in curtailing the sovereign power for any length of time, whether among the vineyards and olive groves of ancient Greece, the mountain homesteads of the Swiss peasantry, or the broad acres of Columbia's virgin soil, or the vast ranches of South America, the majority of the inhabitants have been devoted to agriculture; and it is equally true that the cultivators of the soil have been the most prompt, the most active, and the most enduring in defending their rights and institutions, whether local or national.

THE RELATIONS OF AGRICULTURE TO NATIONS.

It would be an interesting topic, did the time permit, to show the relations of agriculture to nations-to illustrate this fact that land and its cultivation are the life powers of nations, which give strength, liberty, wealth and permanence. This is true of the most ancient-it is true of the most modern. As agriculture has been most advanced, civilization has most advanced, and flourishing and stable nationalities have been established. Such is the evidence in the case of China, whose husbandry has attained great perfection, as it must that a third of the whole human race might be fed from its soil. Here is an empire that has lived and flourished ever since the morning of time. History runs not back to its beginnings; and to-day it teems with life, abounds in wealth, and boasts of its philosophy, literature and sciences. Through all the ages agriculture has been most honored by the Chinese. It has been recognized by the sages, patronized by the statesmen, and praised by the poets. Even the Emperor, claiming relationship to the gods, every year comes down from his throne to mingle with the people at their grand agricultural festival, and holds the plough and turns the furrow with his own hands. The Hindoos present another illustration. We find them a polished and refined people, possessing a very perfect system of religion,

with sages dealing with the most subtle questions of philosophy, having a beneficent code of laws, and skilled in commerce and manufactures, fifteen hundred years before Moses, and more than three thousand years before the Christian era. The antiquity of the people about the Ganges, is settled by astronomical tables that admit of no mistake; and equally well settled is it that this people, who so flourished centuries before the first grey dawn of civilization on Europe, and when America was all unknown, made agriculture, carried to the highest perfection, the basis of all their prosperity. These nations have been invaded and plundered time and again, but have as often renewed themselves from the cultivation of the soil, and still have material and mental greatness. On the other hand the nomadic tribes of Central Asia-the Huns, the Monguls, and the Tartars, who have at different times overrun the world with their fierce warriors, have never been able to form permanent empires.

We come westward, and the same phenomena are presented. Babylonia and Persia, Palestine and Egypt, have risen to power and flourished long, when agriculture was the basis of their civilization; and they have passed away when that ceased to be, or sunk equally with that. Before Greece had risen or Rome dominated over the nations, the law of the Medes and Persians controlled an empire equalling in grandeur any that had gone before or has come since. It covered all of western Asia and included 127 satraps who ruled in the name of one great king. What was the foundation of that power is seen by us in the remains of canals, and reservoirs and aqueducts for irrigation; for Babylonia, wrote Herodotus, more than three thousand years ago, was chiefly watered by irrigation; and he declared it the most fruitful of all countries. For centuries later, the elder Pliny said "there is not a country in all the East comparable to it in fertility." Some of the most stupendous works that the intellect of man ever devised were there constructed for the irrigation of the soil, in an almost

rainless region, which, from a desert, was converted into a garden and made to blossom as the rose.

How Agriculture was honored will be seen by one of Xenophan's stories that will be remembered by every school boy. He tells how the Grecian envoy, Lysander, was received by Cyrus the Younger, at Sardis, who pointed out to him the beauty of his plantations, the avenues of trees, the fragrant shrubbery, and the delightful walks of the royal grounds; and when the Spartan warrior, with his native Greek love for art, said "I admire the beautiful scene, but much more the artist by whose skill it was created." Cyrus, king of all the East replied: "It was laid out and measured by myself, and a portion of the trees planted by my own hands; nor do I ever go to my dinner," he continued, " till I have earned my appetite by some military or agricultural exercise." There was the basis of the Persian empire in agriculture-the employment of kings, and nobles and peasants; and not till great wars occurred, when agriculture was neglected, the husbandman was turned to the soldier, and in oppressive taxation their great works for watering the soil were neglected and went to decay, did the power of the nation cease. Then the drifting sands came to hide the monuments of departed wealth and power and glory, and the places where the olive and the vine grew, and rich luxuriant verdure gladdened the eye, changed to the wild and dreary desert.

Agriculture did the same for Egypt as for Persia. By it she attained the highest civilization and succeeded to the greatest power, long before Grecian art or Roman heroism were known. One of the Egyptian monarchs even changed the bed of the Nile from along the Lybian chain of mountains to the center of the valley, that agriculture might receive its benefits; and it was into Egypt that the roving tribes went for bread, and became tributary therefor, even before the foundations of the Pyramids were laid. With agricultural prosperity came science, arts and industry. "All the learning of the

Egyptians" comprised at one time all the learning of the world. Into Egypt God sent the miserable nomadic Jews to learn Agriculture, before they could be fitted for the great mission to which they were called. Without that agriculture the little territory of Palestine could never have supported its great population, and the Hebrew nation would not have arisen above the level of their kinsmen, the barbarian Arabs of the south; without that Jerusalem would not have been, the temple and the altar would not have existed; the throne of David at most would have been acknowledged only by roving tribes, and Solomon would have been without the wealth or wisdom of his day.

In the line of great nations Greece followed, whose agriculture was honored, as is evidenced by their festivities and sacred mysteries, and the deification of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, and of Bacchus, the god of wine. Next came Rome, that owed what she was to Agriculture. Her poets sang the praises of her husbandmen. Vigil, whose poetry revolutionized Roman agriculture, writes thus:

"Now, O Mæcenus, I begin to sing

What shall make joyful corn-fields in the spring;

And tell the husbandmen beneath what sign
To turn the earth and train the clinging vine;
What care the oxen and the flocks will please;
And great experience of the frugal bees."

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Her orators, like Cicero, could say " I have now come to the farmer's life, with which I am exceedingly delighted, and which seems to me to belong especially to the life of a wise man." Her statesmen and warriors were as renowned in agriculture as in the Senate and on the battle-field. Cincinnatus, who drove the enemy from the gates of Rome; Paulus Æmilius, whose triumph was graced by the Macedonian king; Scipio, who broke the power of Carthage; Cato, the favorite of the people-the warrior and the statesman, whose writings were authority to the husbandmen of his day-were all practical agriculturists.