ESSAY ON AGRICULTURE.
The judicious and increasing attention of our citizens to agricultural pursuits, must be regarded, by every enlightened friend of his country, as among the happiest presages of its future prosperity. Agriculture, the most ancient and useful of the arts, the inseparable companion, if not the parent, of civilization, is rapidly obtaining that rank in public estimation, to which its intimate connexion with the cardinal interests of every well regulated community gives it so unquestionable a claim. The absurd prejudice, which has associated the cultivation of the soil with the idea of an ignoble servitude, is fast disappearing under the influence of milder systems of government, and has already ceased to operate on minds having the least pretensions to discrimination or enlargement of view.—The Patriarch of the human race was commanded by his Creator to "replenish the earth, and to subdue it;" we may, therefore, infer, that a limited attention to agriculture was among the happy employments of Adam, in the days of primeval innocence.
But, in the language of a distinguished prelate, that original transgression which banished man from Paradise, banished Paradise from the earth. The primal curse is still in unmitigated operation, and, without "the sweat of the brow," the least reluctant soils will yield but scanty fruits for the sustenance and the comfort of man. Toil is an indispensable pre-requisite in every department of life, where wealth, or honour, or even daily bread, is sought with a reasonable prospect of success. The scholar, amid the lofty abstractions of the closet, when fatigued by incessant vigils, realizes the painful truth, that "much study is a weariness of the flesh." The merchant, though stimulated by the incitements of enterprise and the bustle of occupation, must occasionally feel the energies of his body and mind relax under the pressure of business, without variety and without remission. And how grievous are the toils of those choice spirits who discover no enterprise but in the pursuit of pleasure—who disdain to "eat the bread of carefulness," and seek, amid the fugitive joys of sensuality, a temporary refuge from the torpor of dejection, or the oppressive listlessness of voluntary inaction.
Let not the unobtrusive husbandman fear to compare his lot with that of those whose proud externals and apparent exemption from toil are extremely fallacious indications of their just rank on the scale of human happiness. Living in a land of promise and of plenty, and under the government of mild equal laws, the American Farmer must exult in the consciousness that "the lines are fallen to him in pleasant places"—that his is, in truth, a goodly heritage. He loves the soil, because it is the legacy of his fathers, and because he derives from its fruitful bosom the means of sustaining life, and protecting his feelings and opinions from the dictation of arrogance and the various temptations of penury.
His quiet and unsophisticated modes of thinking and living, indispose him to listen with eagerness to the solicitations of intrigue or sedition, and it is proverbial that the contagious frenzy of revolution, extends not without difficulty, to the cautious, reflective, and well balanced mind of the farmer.
[R. I. American.