When we turn our thoughts to the condition of England, we must perceive of what immense importance is every, even the smallest, degree of improvement in its agricultural productions. Suppose that, by some new discovery, or some improved mode of culture, only one per cent. could be added to the annual results of English cultivation; this, of itself, would materially affect the comfortable subsistence of millions of human beings. It is often said that England is a garden. This 457 is a strong metaphor. There is poor land and some poor cultivation in England. All people are not equally industrious, careful, and skillful. But, on the whole, England is a prodigy of agricultural wealth. Flanders may possibly surpass it. I have not seen Flanders; but England quite surpasses, in this respect, whatever I have seen. In associations for the improvement of agriculture we have been earlier than England. But such associations now exist there. I had the pleasure of attending the first meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, and I found it a very pleasant and interesting occasion. Persons of the highest distinction for rank, talents, and wealth were present, all zealously engaged in efforts for the promotion of the agricultural interest. No man in England is so high as to be independent of the success of this great interest; no man so low as not to be affected by its prosperity or its decline. The same is true, eminently and emphatically true, with us. Agriculture feeds us; to a great degree it clothes us; without it we could not have manufactures, and we should not have commerce. These all stand together, but they stand together like pillars in a cluster, the largest in the centre, and that largest is agriculture. Let us remember, too, that we live in a country of small farms and freehold tenements; a country in which men cultivate with their own hands their own fee-simple acres, drawing not only their subsistence, but also their spirit of independence and manly freedom, from the ground they plough. They are at once its owners, its cultivators, and its defenders. And, whatever else may be undervalued or overlooked, let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. Man may be civilized, in some degree, without great progress in manufactures and with little commerce with his distant neighbors. But without the cultivation of the earth, he is, in all countries, a savage. Until he gives up the chase, and fixes himself in some place and seeks a living from the earth, he is a roaming barbarian. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
FOOTNOTES
Remarks on the Agriculture of England, made at a Meeting of the Legislature of Massachusetts, and others interested in Agriculture, held at the State-House in Boston, on the Evening of the 13th of January, 1840.
END OF VOLUME FIRST.
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