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Gold-Hunting.

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men have of late years bestowed on this most important field of research. We are grateful for every honest endeavour to throw light upon the mysterious agencies of nature in developing and perfecting the beautiful vegetable life which delights and supports our own animal existence. We are not surprised that so little has been accomplished, and we do not fear that patient devotees of science will be discouraged at the magnitude of their labors and the slowness of their progress; we shall not regret the mortification which may await scientific arrogance and presumption. The failure in the application of chemical, geological, atmospheric, electric, and entomological knowledge to the practice of agriculture has, in great part, arisen from the fact, that the scientific minds which, in the seclusion of the study, investigate the nature and the causes, are not able in the field to follow and observe the operations, of things. Men of science reason back from effect to cause, from development to law; practical farmers have need to know the cause and the law, that they may anticipate the effect and the development. We cannot expect all men to be well-informed men of science, but we might have all farmers well informed in the elements of science pertaining to their own profession. In this connection we commend Mr. Colman's chapters on agricultural education; they will afford many useful hints which we should be glad to have accepted.

The possession of a small capital is often with our young men a reason for abandoning the life of a farmer. This is a strange perversion, but daily experience confirms the truth of the statement. Just now thousands of young men are leaving happy homes and rushing eagerly into crowded steerages to undergo a five months' confinement on ship-board, and all the hardships of a passage round Cape Horn, that they may mix among the depraved and outcast of the earth in a greedy scramble for gold. That Sacramento valley, foul with crime, squalid with hunger, and reeking with disease, has more allurements for them than the peaceful, abundant, healthful fields of New England, where honest, patient industry has never failed to realize the promise of Scripture, "He that tilleth his land shall be satisfied with bread." is probably no extravagant estimate, that in the course of 1849 fifty thousand persons will have visited the gold regions of California. Allow each man to have spent two hundred dollars in reaching the land of promise, and the whole cost

It

of the emigration will amount to ten millions of dollars, all expended in an attempt to grow rapidly rich in a demoralizing and enervating search after gold. The two hundred dollars paid as passage money, and for an outfit, would buy one hundred and sixty acres of the most fertile land. The wages

of five months, worse than wasted at sea, would buy a yoke of cattle. The price of a return passage would cover the necessary cash expenses of a comfortable house. Can it be said, in view of this estimate, that there is no capital which can be spared for agriculture? There is capital, but there is more avarice, and the money is put into channels whose currents, though swift and dangerous, yet flow towards some region of great prospective gain.

Farming is sometimes considered a low and vulgar occupation. Shallow-headed shopkeepers and silly merchants' clerks will have their jest at the clodhopper, when his blue frock brushes against their broadcloth. Let them enjoy their harmless amusement: for ourselves, as a matter of taste, we prefer a pitchfork to a yardstick, would rather turn a greensward than a cotton-bale, and think it better to feed the cows than to handle green-salted cowhides. Merchants of high ambition and extended operations are apt to look upon farming as a petty business. When we compare individuals, and place the great results of successful mercantile enterprise against the average results of successful farming, there seems to be some reason for the objection. It is true, that, in a comparison of individuals, the merchant's business appears great beside the farmer's; but such a comparison does not exhibit the whole truth, but only a partial statement, which leads to error. Commerce is based upon the interchange of the products of the earth; a very important part of all the products of the earth are derived from agriculture; commerce is, therefore, in a very important degree, based upon agriculture. The merchant holds much the same position in reference to the farmers which the executive and representative officers in a democracy hold towards the people: the farmers are the constituency; the merchants are the chosen servants, laboring, like most other servants, with a careful eye to their own advantage. They are honorable for their enterprise, and indispensable in their usefulness; they should be too intelligent to despise the humble labors which afford the material for their great operations. In every populous country the home consumption absorbs the chief portion of

1849.]

Agricultural Interest Conservative.

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the agricultural produce; hence it is seldom fully reckoned in commercial statistics. Those products which are exported acquire an undue importance in the estimation of legislators and of merchants, and the actual productive wealth of a country can be but imperfectly understood by an inspection of its statute-books and custom-house accounts. We read much about cotton and sugar in our Congressional reports; we seldom find a sentence which treats of hay and potatoes: and yet the actual annual value of all the cotton of the United States is less than one half of the annual value of the hay crop, and the price of all the potatoes would buy all the sugar twice over.*

The agricultural interest is the great conservative interest of a country. It attaches men to the soil; it makes it desirable for them to maintain the established order of things against the attacks of subversive and reckless reformers; it may sometimes make them bigots, — it never can make them revolutionists. The history of La Vendée in the earlier periods of the French revolution of 1789, and the yet incomplete history of the revolution of February, 1848, afford strong proof of the tendency of an agricultural community to withstand the most exciting temptations to anarchy and destructiveness. The Vendéans were a people living a retired life on little farms, situated in a secluded and salubrious region. Their gains were small, their habits were simple, and their minds were calm and religious. For four years they took no active part in the tumultuous proceedings of a people mad with license, only submitting to the revolutionary government with an acknowledgment of its de facto power, but avoiding, up to this time, the excesses which disgraced the inhabitants of many of the large cities of France. At length the patience of a loyal people became exhausted; the religious sentiment so long outraged burst forth with all the zeal of a crusade, and the farmers of La Vendée for a long time held in check the torrent of licentious anarchy which all Europe was for a quarter of a century unable to control. Those dying words of Sombreuil were a fit expression of the constancy of his compatriots. "I bend," said he, as he knelt to receive the death-shot, "I bend one knee to my God, and another to my sovereign."

* See Patent-Office Reports for 1844, 1845, and 1847, and New Orleans Price Current, September 1, 1847.

Was it from a wonderful forecast, or in a blind obedience to destiny, that Napoleon, in the midday of his glory and the fulness of his power, enacted, in 1803, that law of succession which, in 1848, had so much effect in staying the tide of revolution, and placing a second Napoleon in the presidential chair of France? The subdivision of the land which followed as a necessary consequence of the new law of inheritance seems to have infused a spirit of conservatism even into the excitable minds of Frenchmen. Mr. Colman states, on the authority of Porter, that "in 1838 the population of landed proprietors, with their families, was estimated at 20,000,000, or nearly two thirds of the total population. The average size of each property is about fourteen acres." Here, then, are a large majority of a people having a direct personal interest in the preservation of good order and peace. They all have ties to their homes; they all have a personal interest in the acts of the government. On them falls the burden of taxation; on them are visited the distress and the horrors of war. He may well dread a conscription, who may be called by it to leave a happy fireside and a productive farm; he may well dread, and will doubtless resist, a project for aggressive invasion, who will be sure to find in increased and unavoidable taxation bitter experience of its cost. He is of necessity concerned in the sure and progressive prosperity of a country, who has freehold possession of a portion of its soil. It is not necessary to defend the wisdom of the Vendéans in 1793, or of the electors of 1848. The history of the parties shows a desire in an agricultural people to maintain some fixed and definite government in opposition to anarchy. We may reasonably presume that the situation and the conduct of a people hold mutually the relation of cause and effect.

The moral influences of agriculture are genial and elevating. The farmer is, next after God, a creator. He walks in daily intimacy with nature, is daily called upon to yield obedience to her laws. He may be dull, he may be wicked but if so, he cannot charge the stupidity or the sin upon the enervating or the seductive influences of business. A free heaven is always above him, a friendly soil bears up his footsteps; let him raise his thoughts above, and bend in labor on the earth below. God will not deceive him. He, of all men, is sure of his reward.

W. A. D.

1849.]

Mary Barton.

ART. IX. MON BARTON.*

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"MARY BARTON" did not come forth under the auspicious influence of any great name or favorite author, but, if American republishers ever read what they print, here surely was an opportunity of treating with some little respect, so far as typography is concerned, a production whose intrinsic worth will insure it a wide circulation, even in the Messrs. Harpers' small type and double columns. The work was published in England, last October, anonymously; but it is well known to have been written by the wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester, a first attempt, as we understand. It is long since we read Waverley," the immortal tale,' as Lockhart calls it, said to have been Scott's first attempt at novel-writing; but it does not seem to us now that we could have read it with such a depth of interest, nor with such mingled emotions of pain and pleasure, as have been excited by the perusal of " Mary Barton." And yet Waverley had all the extraneous aids of history, the romance belonging to every thing connected with Scotland at the period referred to, and the charm, to every Scottish heart, in the name of Stuart. Mary Barton is a poor weaver's daughter; her home, a small house in a "little paved court" in "dingy, smoky Manchester." Who has ever associated romance or pathos with the dizzy whirl of machinery, or the fumes. of roaring furnaces, making "darker that which was dark. enough before"? Yet the writer of this tale has succeeded in producing a charming work. It possesses, we think, extraordinary merit; and we sit down, we confess, to praise it, and that most heartily. There is about it what can be found in few or none of the works of fiction of the present day, verily, a beauty of holiness, though it has not the slightest pretension to be what is technically called a "religious novel." The reader is made to feel that true religion, the spirit of Christianity, is the all-pervading principle in the mind of the writer, whose own beautiful character breathes through every page of the book. There is no effort, no straining after effect. So simply and naturally is the fearful story told, that we feel as if we were listening to a true tale from the lips of a

Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. In two Volumes. London: Chapman & Hall: 1848. 12mo. pp 317 and 312.

The Same. New York: Harper & Brothers. 8vo. pp. 149.