who drove the Æqui and Volsci from the gates of Rome; that Paulus Æmilius who led the last king of Macedonia with his family in triumph up the steps of the Capitol; that Scipio who at Zama forever broke the power of Carthage; those iron-handed, iron-hearted consuls who conducted the Roman legions over degenerate Greece, and fiery Africa, and effeminate Asia, in the intervals of war and conquest tilled their little Latian farms. That stern censor who first made the name of austere frugality synonymous with Cato, wrote a treatise on the cultivation of the soil; and, so sure was a great Roman chief, in the best days of the republic, to be found at his farm, that the sergeants-at-arms, sent by the senate to summon them to the command of legions and the conquest of nations, were technically called viatores, "travellers."

At length the Roman civilization perished, and a new one, resting on the morality of the gospel and the hardy virtues of the northern races, took its place, and has subsisted, with gradual modifications, to the present day. Its first political development was in the land tenures of the feudal system, and it still rests on the soil. Notwithstanding the great mul tiplication of pursuits in modern times, the perfection of the useful and the fine arts, the astonishing expansion of commercial, manufacturing, and mechanical industry, agriculture has kept pace with the other occupations of society, and continues to be the foundation of the social system. The tenure cultivation, and produce of the soil, still remain the primary interests of the community. The greatest political philosopher and most consummate statesman of modern Europe, Edmund Burke, who saw further than any of his countrymen into the cloudy future which hung over the close of the eigh teenth century, at the meridian of his life, and while most engrossed in public business, purchased a large farm. "I have," says he in a letter written to a friend in that most critical year of English politics, 1768, "just made a push with all

* "That description of property (landed property) is in its nature the firm base of every stable government." - Burke's Letters on a Regicide

Peace.

I could collect of my own and the aid of my friends, to cast a little root in the country. I have purchased about six hundred acres of land in Buckinghamshire, about twenty-four miles from London. It is a place exceedingly pleasant, and I purpose, God willing, to become a farmer in good earnest." This his purpose he carried into effect, and adhered to it to the end of his life. Those immortal orations, which revived in the British senate the glories of the ancient eloquence, were meditated in the retirement of Beaconsfield; and there also were composed those all but inspired appeals and expostulations which went to the heart of England and Europe in the hour of their dearest peril, and did so much to expose the deformity and arrest the progress, of that godless philosophy, — specious, arrogant, hypocritical, and sanguinary, which, with liberty and equality on its lips, and plunder and murder and treason in its heart, waged deadly war on France and mankind, and closed a professed crusade for republican freedom by the establishment of a military despotism.

A greater than Burke in this country, our own peerless Washington, with a burden of public care on his mind such as has seldom weighed upon any other person,-conscious, through a considerable part of his career, that the success, not only of the American Revolution but of the whole great experiment of republican government, was dependent in no small degree upon his course and conduct, - yet gave throughout his life, in time of peace, more of his time and attention, as he himself in one of his private letters informs us, to the superintendence of his agricultural operations, than to any other object. "It will not be doubted," says he, in his last annual message to Congress, (7th of December, 1796,) "that, with reference either to individual or national welfare, agriculture is of primary importance. In proportion as nations advance in population and other circumstances of maturity, this truth becomes more apparent, and renders the cultivation of the soil more and more an object of public patronage. Among the means which have been employed to this end, none have been attended with greater success

than the establishment of boards, charged with collecting and diffusing information, and enabled, by premiums and small pecuniary aids, to encourage and assist a spirit of discovery and improvement." On the 10th of December, 1799, Washington addressed a long letter to the manager of his farms, the last elaborate production of his pen,-transmitting a plan, drawn up on thirty written folio pages, containing directions for their cultivation for several years to come. In seven days from the date of this letter his own venerated form was sown a natural body, to be raised a spiritual body.”

Nearly all the successors of Washington in the Presidency of the United States, both the deceased and the living, passed or are passing their closing years in the dignified tranquillity of rural pursuits. One of the most distinguished of them, Mr. Jefferson, invented the hill-side plough. Permit me also to dwell for a moment on the more recent example of the four great statesmen of the North, the West, and the South,-whose names are the boast and the ornament of the last generation,- Adams, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster, who forgot the colossal anxieties, the stern contentions, the herculean labors and the thankless sacrifices of the public service, in the retirement of the country, and the calm and healthful pursuits of agriculture. One of these four great men it was not my fortune personally to behold in the enjoyment of these calm and rational pleasures; but I well remember hearing him say, with a radiant countenance, that there was nothing in the triumphs or honors of public life so grateful to his feelings as his return to his home in Carolina, at the close of the session of Congress, when every individual on his plantation, not excepting the humblest, came out to bid him welcome, and to receive the cordial pressure of his hand. I was often the witness of the heart-felt satisfaction which Mr. Adams enjoyed on his ancestral acres, especially in contemplating the trees planted by himself, thousands of which are now scattered over the estate. While he ministered in this way to the gratification and service of other times, he felt that he was discharging no small portion of the debt which each generation owes to its successors. Adopting a tree as the device of his

seal, he added to it, as the expressive motto, the words which Cicero quotes with approbation from an ancient Latin poet, alteri sæculo. Mr. Adams took particular pleasure in watching the growth of some white maples, the seeds of which he had gathered as they dropped from the parent trees in front of that venerable hall in Philadelphia which echoed to his honored father's voice in the great argument of American independence. At Ashland, in 1829, I rode over his extensive farm, with the illustrious orator and statesman of the West; and as the "swinish multitude," attracted by the salt which he liberally scattered from his pocket, came running about us in the beautiful woodland pasture, carpeted with that famous Kentucky blue grass, he good-humoredly compared them to the office-seekers, who hurry to Washington at the commencement of an administration, attracted by the well-flavored relish of a good salary. Mr. Webster, reposing on his farm, at Marshfield, from the toils of the forum and the conflicts of the senate, resembled the mighty ocean which he so much loved, which, after assaulting the cloudy battlements of the sky with all the seething artillery of his furious billows, when the gentle south-west wind sings truce to the elemental war, calls home his rolling mountains to their peaceful level, and mirrors the gracious heavens in his glassy bosom.

The culture of the soil has, in all ages, been regarded as an appropriate and congenial occupation for declining life. Cicero, in his admirable treatise on "Old Age," speaking in the person of Cato the elder, to whom I have already referred, when he comes to consider the pleasures within the reach of the aged, gives the most prominent place to those which may be enjoyed in agricultural pursuits. These, he adds, are not impaired by the advance of years, and approach, as near as possible, to the ideal "life of the Wise Man." Guided by the light of nature, he contemplated with admiration that "power," as he calls it, of the earth, by which it is enabled to return to the husbandman, with usury, what he has committed to its trust. It belongs to us, favored with a knowledge of the spiritual relations of the universe not

vouchsafed to the heathen world, to look upon agriculture in higher aspects, especially in the advance of life; and as we move forward ourselves toward the great crisis of our being, to catch an intelligent glimpse of the grand arcana of nature, as exhibited in the creative energy of the terrestrial elements; the suggestive mystery of the quickening seed and the sprouting plant; the resurrection of universal nature from her wintry grave.

A celebrated sceptical philosopher of the last century, the historian Hume, thought to demolish the credibility of the Christian Revelation by the concise argument, "It is contrary to experience that a miracle should be true, but not contrary to experience that testimony should be false." The last part of the proposition, especially in a free country, on the eve of a popular election, is, unhappily, too well founded; but in what book-worm's dusty cell, tapestried with the cobwebs of ages, where the light of real life and nature never forced its way in what pedant's school, where deaf ears listen to dumb lips, and blind followers are led by blind guides - did he learn that it is contrary to experience that a miracle should be true? Most certainly he never learned it from sower or reaper. - from dumb animal or rational man connected with husbandry. Poor Red-Jacket, off here on Buffalo Creek, if he could have comprehended the terms of the proposition, would have treated it with scorn. Contrary to experience that phenomena should exist which we cannot trace to causes perceptible to the human sense, or conceivable by human thought! It would be much nearer the truth to say, that within the husbandman's experience there are no phenomena, which can be rationally traced to any thing but the instant energy of creative power.

Did this philosopher ever contemplate the landscape at the close of the year, when seeds and grains and fruits have ripened, and stalks have withered and leaves have fallen, and winter has forced her icy curb even into the roaring jaws of Niagara, and sheeted half a continent in her glittering shroud, and all this teeming vegetation and organized life are locked in cold and marble obstruction; and, after week upon