At about half-past eight o’clock, the Society came into the Hall, already crowded in every part, and its President, Hon. Samuel F. Perley, in brief and complimentary terms, introduced Col. Davis, who advanced to the speaker’s stand, and was received with loud and prolonged applause. He said:
Ladies and gentlemen, friends and countrymen: To the many acts of kindness received from the people of Maine, I have to add the welcome reception this evening. The invitation of the Agricultural Society, with the attendant circumstances, serve further to impress me with the hospitality of ray fellow citizens of this State. Coming here, an invalid, seeking the benefits which your clime would afford, and preceded by a reputation which was expected to prejudice you unfavorably towards me, I have everywhere met courtesy and considerate attention, from the hour I landed on your coast to the present time. It was natural to ask, whence come these manifestations? Is it because the opinion which had been formed has been found to be unjust, and the reaction has been in proportion to the previous impulse? Or is it the exhibition of your regard for loyalty to one’s friends, and devotion by a citizen to the community to which he belongs? Either the one or the other is honorable to you; but there is a broader and more beneficent motive—the prompting of that sentiment which would cause you to recognize in every American citizen a brother. That feeling which Daniel Webster indicated when he met me in company with your distinguished townsman, ex-Senator Bradbury, and taking us with the right hand and with the left, said in the peculiarly impressive manner which belonged to him, “My brethren of the North and of the South, how are ye?”
It is usual to offer to an Agricultural Society nothing less than a prepared address, and had I come with an intention to speak to you, I should not have failed to make that preparation which is evidence of due regard for the audience. The invitation under which I now speak, having been given and accepted this evening, I have no power to do more than to offer you desultory remarks on such subjects as my visit to the Fair have suggested, and which may occur to me as I progress.
With great pleasure I have witnessed evidences of much attention and deep interest in agriculture. It is the basis of all wealth. It is the producer—brings all new contributions to the general store. The mechanic arts are essential to its success, and they serve by changing the form, to multiply the value of agricultural products. And commerce too, by exchanging the products of individuals and of countries, enhances the value of labor, and increases the comfort of man. They are all essential to each other. I have no disposition to magnify or depreciate either, but my proposition is, that the soil is the source from which human wealth springs. In addition to these pursuits, society requires what are termed liberal professions. They are not producers, though they may contribute, by diffusing knowledge, to increase production. They may be necessary to give security to property and to take care of some physical wants. For instance you have lawyers and doctors; and the less need you have of them the better; for though necessary, like government, it is evil which makes them so. As to another class—those who have the cure of souls—their mission is so sacred, their function so high as to place them beyond comment; and of them I have nothing to say, except that I propose to say nothing.
Among the products of agriculture I of course intended to include the farmer’s stock, and I must here bear my tribute of admiration to the fine display which has been made of horned cattle; particularly of work oxen, remarkable for their size, their adaptation to the purposes for which they are kept and the docility and yet the unflagging spirit which they manifested in the trials of strength and of deep ploughing. I have not before seen such fine specimens of the Devon cattle,—of course I speak of them as they present themselves to the eye—not pretending to judge of their relative value to other stock exhibited. Improvement in the breed of domestic animals goes hand in hand with agricultural mechanism, to give the ability to make two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before, and thus to render you indeed benefactors. Skill in the use, and ingenuity in devising and constructing implements, serve to render labor productive, and relieve it of its most dreary drudgery. It is this mechanical ingenuity which has compensated for the high price of labor among us, and aided in the development of resources which makes our country the greatest of the earth. Blest by soil, climate and government, if we are, as claimed, pre-eminent among nations, it is because we have added to other advantages a more general cultivation of the mind. The superiority is attributable not so much to physical energy, activity and perseverance, as to the improvement of that portion of the man which lies above the eyes.
Though you have done much for the improvement of agricultural implements, your work is far from being completed. It is not a little surprising that we should, to this day, have no reliable rule by which to make a plough, and though the model has been improved, certainly it is yet not unlike, and so far as exact science is concerned, is on a par with that implement as used by the Romans, and as it appeared in ancient architecture; the form, proportion and angular relation of the parts, and the adjustment of the whole to the power to be applied, offer problems alike interesting to the mechanic, and useful to the cultivator. In your ploughing matches sufficient evidence was afforded of the fitness of the implements employed to turn deep and wide furrows; but should we be content with such result as is obtained by trying different models, and then copying one which is found to be good?
Maine was so richly endowed with harbors and forests of ship timber that it was naturally to be expected, as it has fallen out, that the pursuits of navigation would most occupy the attention of her people. But let not her sons look to the period when her forests have disappeared as that beyond which her prosperity may not continue. There are large tracts of land which when labor is no longer directed to lumber, will become, in the hands of the farmer, what the valley of the Kennebec now is. The land may not offer soil so deep as alluvial districts, nor be at first as productive as those on which a deep vegetable mould has accumulated, yet its productiveness may not be less permanent than those. In them the elements which support the farmer’s crop may be exhausted by cultivation or carried down into substrata of gravel or sand. In the remote West to which so many are pressing, the emigrant will encounter an arid climate in which irrigation is necessary to ensure a return for the labor of husbandry, and this involves an original expenditure which it will usually require large capital to bear. In this climate the sun, like a mighty pump, is daily raising the water which the currents of cold air from the mountains, or from the sea, precipitate in the form of genial showers during the period of your growing crops; and the granite of the mountains slowly, but steadily disintegrating, gives up its fertilizing property to be scattered by unseen hands over plain and over valley. With care and with skill in its use I can see no end to the productiveness of that portion of your land which is fit for cultivation.
Your crops, and your mode of tillage are different from that to which I am accustomed, and the result is that each supplies a different segment in the circle of man’s wants. I am glad that it is so, that it must necessarily be so. Glad, because it is an everlasting bond between us; one which, whilst it binds, renders both doubly prosperous. Blessed is our lot in this, that our fathers linked us together, and established free trade between us. In the diversity of climate, and of crops, there is an assurance that entire failure cannot occur. If disaster and blight should fall upon one section, it need not go to a foreign land in search of bread. Famine, gaunt famine, with its skeleton step, can never pass our borders whilst the free trade of the Union continues.
But difference in pursuits, in population, and domestic institutions, have been made the basis of hostile agitation, and urged as a cause of separation. To my mind the reverse would be the rational conclusion. Each exchanging, the surplus of that which it can best produce for the surplus of another which it most requires, the benefit must be mutual, and the advantage common. Here is a commercial, a selfish bond to hold us together. But I will stop here, because the current of my thought is carrying me beyond the limit of topics proper to the occasion, and I must offer as an apology the fact, that though myself a cultivator of the soil, my mind has for several years been given so much to political subjects, that in speaking without having previously arranged what to say, the thought inadvertently runs from the matter I wished to present, into collateral questions of governmental concern. Before turning back, however, into the original channel, permit me to say that the diversity of which I have been speaking, formed no small inducement to the union of the States, and that it has been through that union that we have attained to our present position, and stand to-day, all things considered, the happiest, and among the greatest in the family of nations.
In looking around upon the evidences you have brought of mechanical and agricultural improvement, I have viewed it not with the curiosity of a stranger, but with the interest of one who felt that he had a part in it, as an exhibition of the prosperity of his country. The whole confederacy is my country, and to the innermost fibres of my heart I love it all, and every part. I could not if I would, and would not if I could, dwarf myself to mere sectionality. My first allegiance is to the State of which I am a citizen, and to which by affection and association I am personally bound; but this does not obstruct the perception of your greatness, or admiration for much which I have found admirable among you.