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.

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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; that, 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 no 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 homes, and the homesteads 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 farmersay, 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. 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.—Address before Vermont Agricultural Society, Rutland, Sept. 2, 1852.

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The Same.

BUT, gentlemen, in whatever direction your efforts may be made, you will encounter difficulties and discouragements. You will be opposed by that contented spirit which regards every improvement as innovation, and which perpetually, though falsely, complains that mankind degenerate without making an effort to check the progress of error. You will be regarded as visionary by those who consider skill in acquiring, and success in retaining wealth, as the perfection of human wisdom; but will remember that such as these seldom bestow their countenance upon the benefactors of mankind, nor does Fortune always distinguish them by her favors. Robert Morris, a financier of the Revolution, died a bankrupt. Christopher Colles, our efficient advocate of inland navigation in the last century, was interred by private charity in the Strangers' burying-ground. The essays of Jesse Hawley, which demonstrated the feasibility and importance of a continuous canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson river, were sent forth from a debtor's prison; and De Witt Clinton, whose name is written upon the capital of every column of our social edifice, was indebted to private hospitality for a tomb. It is the same generous and patriotic spirit which animated those philanthropists, and sustained them in their struggles with the prejudices of the age in which they lived, that I desire to invoke in favor of agriculture. This spirit, wisely directed, can not fail, for it has been irresistible in every department it has hitherto entered. But let us all remember that the only true way to begin reform is to find the source of error; and that if we cultivate man, the improvement of the animal and vegetable kingdoms will surely follow.-Address before N. Y. State Agricultural Society, Albany, Sept. 29, 1842.

INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.

Enternal Emprovement the Policy of the Founders of the Republic.

THE principle of internal improvement derives its existence from the generous impulses of the revolutionary age. It regards the future welfare, prosperity, and happiness of the people. Its agency is everywhere salutary in encouraging emigration and the settlement and improvement of new lands, in augmenting national wealth, in promoting agriculture, commerce, manufactures, and the diffusion of knowledge, and in strengthening the bonds of our national Union. It is recited in the Declaration of Independence as one of the wrongs committed by the king of England, that he had endeavored to prevent the population of these states, and for that purpose had obstructed the laws for the naturalization of foreigners, had refused to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and had raised the condition of new appropriations of lands. The father of his country could have had none of the modern skepticism when in his first message to Congress he recommended a facilitation of the intercourse between distant parts of the country by a due attention to the postoffice and postroads. The population of the United States was confined for almost two centuries to the Atlantic coast, but the mighty mind of Washington perceived that a region far more extended, fertile, and salubrious, lay beyond the borders of the thirteen states; that inasmuch as the sovereignty of the Union was distributed among the cultivators of the earth, the political power of the government would find a centre in that region; that if the natural barriers between that region and the East should remain unchanged the West would at no distant -pe