"God made the Country."

Agriculture—the most important duly of man, since it is the keystone of the social fabric—opens the most extensive field for the contemplation of experimental and moral philosophy. It is the basis of the wealth and power of nations, inasmuch as the soil is emphatically the country, and the possessors and cultivators of it emphatically the people. They form the groundwork upon which the manufacturer, the merchant, the mechanic, and the artisan of every denomination, and every other class in the community, build their fortunes.

In a moral point of view the life of the agriculturist is the most pure and holy of any class of men; pure, because it is the most healthful, and vice can hardly find time to contaminate it; and holy, because it brings the Deity perpetually before his view, giving him thereby the most exalted notions of supreme power, and the most fascinating and endearing view of universal benignity. The agriculturist views the Deity in his works; he contemplates the divine economy in the arrangement of the seasons; and he hails nature immediately presiding over every other object that strikes his eyes; he witnesses many of her great and beauteous operation?, and her reproductive faculties; his heart insensibly expands from his minute acquaintance with multifarious objects, all in themselves original; whilst that degree of retirement in which he is placed from the bustling haunts of mankind keeps alive in his breast his natural affections, unblunted by an extensive and perpetual intercourse with man in a more enlarged, and therefore in a more corrupt, state of society.

(Lord Dillon.)