shoals, for she sailed o'er a sea unploughed and unexplored. Yet on he went; a strange look upon his face; a strange light in his cold, grey eye. At times we almost thought him mad; but he saw what we did not he was discerning that-yea Him that is invisible. And though we often questioned his course, and as often counseled another, yet he held right on his way. What mattered it to him that the sun of experience was obscured? What mattered it that all precedents were at fault? None! for he with a faith sublime saw through the driving storm and above the murky clouds the pure, steady ray of the polar star of God's immutable justice. Let winds howl-let seas of war pile wave on wave-let the ship drive onlet empires, kingdoms, republics, whirl down the seething mælstrom, threatening-let all be lost, still God lived; justice must triumph. "Fiat justitia ruat cœlum" was his motto and his rule. He was irresponsible, God was directing, and through him under God we stand bathed in the glowing brightness of to-day.

These are the representative men of the nation's resources. Let them, young men, be the representatives of your manhood. Look to them as models for the formation of your characters. Remember they were pioneers for you. Men who by persistent effort, coupled with integrity-who by the power of their good right arms, unassisted, save by the patron of all noble exertion, God-opened up a path from the plough and the work-shop to the highest seats of earthly honor, and crowned themselves with the more than kingly coronet of a virtuous people's gratitude. Seek thou to do likewise.

Moses, the liberator and law giver of Israel, was not fitted to conquer, or legislate, until he had in the land of Midian kept the flocks of Jethro forty years. King David learned his ideas of political economy, the application of which made Jerusalem "beautiful for situation, and the joy of the whole earth," by governing his flocks on Bethlehem's Plains. And when the Prophet of the Lord came by direction of the Spirit to the house of Jesse, to annoint a King over Israel, he passed by the pampered household pets and chose the farmer boy, who in the field was pursuing his pastoral vocation.

And thus has it ever been. God chooses for his moral emanicipators those who, like his own Son, have "learned experience" by the things they have suffered. Lay off thy sandals while we step on holy ground. Even Jesus the divine one needed the perfections of labor, and the "Captain of our Salvation" was disciplined by eighteen years of life at the carpenter's bench. Who then shall adjudge labor ignoble or enervating to intellect? Who shall limit the farmer's heritage to groveling toil, soiled garments, or acres of common earth? You are the legitimate vine dressers, not only of God's earthy, but moral heritage, fulfilling his first command to "Go, till the garden and beautify it." And that it may elevate you, he has adorned your sphere of labor with concomitants of lofty grandeur, inspiring to aspirations after the greater good lain up with him. It was with clay the Saviour opened the blind man's eyes, to look upon his true divinity, and you, too, should look "through Nature up to Nature's God." Yours, to hold by the indisputable claim, which inheres from the conquest of improvement, are the everlasting mountains that his hand has piled. Yours,

the fertile valleys, covered with their vernal carpetings. Yours, the spreading prairies, and Savannah's. Yours, the billowy hills that break into easy undulations the monotonous plains. The corn which crowns and the cattle which low upon them, are all yours and God's. Yours, the sleeping lakelet-mirrors for angel toilets. Yours, the dashing cataract. All! all are yours as the gift of your Father. Yours, is the grand anthem that comes swelling up from the original temples of God, as animate and inanimate join to hymn the sublime measures of Nature's melody-the soprano of the birdling, the contra-alto of the sloughing zephyr, the tenor of the purling rivulet, the tremolo of the rain drop-or the deep diapason of ocean's surge, blending with the sublime basso of the pealing thunders-all sing for you. For you an Omnipotent and Omniscient artist has exhausted the colors of his pallette to garnish your abode, evincing his care in the minute, as in the infinite, dyeing the azure canopy above, and tinting the bloom upon the ripened plum and clustering grape with the same delicate hue. Studding the upper fields with orbs of burning splendor, and imitating their beauty in the golden dandelion, that flashes its yellow light from the hill-side or verdant lawn, sprinkling alike the azure and vernal meads with beauty profuse, one of the planets and stars, the other of the daisy and cowslip.

Men talk of "A Sin Cursed Earth? A Vale of Tears? A Desert Waste?" Abstractly it is not. Misanthropes! whose ideas indicate disordered minds or diseased livers, go out from the study, or the closet,' among God's temporal glories, go walk with the farmer, and hear the peans of denial that swell from Nature's various voices

"The leaf tongues of the forest, the flower lips of the sod,
"The happy birds, all singing their raptures in the ear of God,
"The summer wind, that bringeth odors over land and sea,
"Have each a voice that sings the sweetest song to me.
"This world is full of beauty, as other worlds above,
"And did we do our duty it might be full of love."

The evils of life are not material, but moral perversions. Sin alone casts its blight. The works of God were, are, and ever shall be for good, and good only.

Yours, too, is the great poem of nature, from whence come those ideals of unrealized beauty which genius has discerned, and burdened with which the insensate canvas and poet's line seem to breathe? Where but from the farmer's domains.

Conning over the psalms penned by Israel's historic King, those lyrics of angelic sweetness, whose soothing balm has quieted many a heart's pang, which come to us as the soul's cordial, but those that reflect upon our weary minds the rest and contentment of Agricultural and pastoral beauty?

When David's heart gushed out to God in confidence of present and future good, when he would wreathe words into most entrancing forms of speech, and present his emotious in most glowing imagery; when he would present God in the most inviting and endearing relations, in what vocation does he contemplate him as existing? He did not turn to the professions or illustrations, saying, "The Lord is my Lawyer, he will make writs for

me," neither to Medicine, saying, "The Lord is my Doctor, he will feed me ipecac and blue pill," nor to the Clergy, saying, "The Lord is my Preacher, he will give me narcotic sermons, profound in theological disquisition and research." No! none of these, but stringing his lute to its highest tension, and elevating his mighty mind to its loftiest flight of imagination, he struck his harp, and while the Spirit's inspiration played along the chords, as lightning o'er the summer evening cloud, he shouted, "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want; he maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters." Turning from his Kingly halls, forgetting his regal tiara, shutting out the teeming marts and unparalleled grandeurs of Jerusalem and its temple, the mighty King found his most perfect idea of happiness, his most vivid conceptions of God and Heaven in the remembrance of his early life, and he cherished as beatific the memory of his boyhood days, when he with light heart and shepherd's crook, tended his bleating flocks on the plains of Bethlehem. Nor could he conceive of a more desirable Heaven than their return to him on the eternal shores.

But lest I weary you, I hasten to an abrupt conclusion, leaving you to infer from the foregoing your own high possibilities of destiny.

We bid you farewell, and God speed, as you return again to your fields of manual toil, to resume, strengthened by the remembrance of this festival, your great, benevolent, benefitting, Mechanical and Agricultural vocations, uniting your efforts to subdue the thorn and thistle, to make the desert to blossom as the rose, and the barren places to gush forth in profusion of good to the race.

Go forth! to do good, and get good. Seek to elevate your calling and yourselves.

Add to your farins improved implements for agriculture, and to your libraries books for brain culture. And while you seek to fertilize the soil, seek also, by reading and meditation, to enrich your minds, for which all else exist.

Beautify your domain as well as till it, for so was the command of God. Let agriculture walk hand in hand with her gentler sister, horticulture. Train the wood-bine and the rose to twine round the cottage door, to cheer the eye dimmed by labor. Seek to make home inviting for your own benefit. It is only the reward and rest, after toil, that gives strength to the arm through the weary day. Then let the piano or organ breathe sweetness ere the day's labor begins, and let music, at the day's decline, as angel's fingers wipe away the sweat of toil, and unravel the brow knit by

care.

Go forth appreciating and esteeming your high mission. Judging the future by the near past, what horoscopes of sublime grandeur to the race present themselves with almost prophetic vividness.

Cast backward the thought through the space of sixty years, and contemplate the now garden portion of our Empire State, as a waste howling wilderness. The sites of our most opulent inland cities, as Buffalo, Utica or Auburn, as marked by a single log hut. These Aladdin like changes occurred within the memory of thousands now living. With our added

auxillaries to enterprise, what consummations may not the child this day born live to behold?

And at whose hands were these miracles of improvement wrought? Whose but the farmers and mechanics, and as monuments to whose memories cities, villages and smiling hamlets rear themselves in blissful contiguity?

The marble palace of the Pharaohs, once visible at the distance of an hundred miles, has crumbled to dust and its site is unknown. The monumental Pyramids have survived the names they were builded to immortalize, but the names of Phelps and Gorham, the pioneer farmers, who seventyfive years ago bade farewell to civilization and penetrated the wilds of what is now Genesee county, shall be perpetuated until the townships which bear their names shall have been transmuted into the "new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness."

In fancy I see the prairies of the West, now burdened with the long grasses and gorgeous flowers, touched by the wand of industry, burdened with fruits and corn; and where the Gopher burrows and the wild hen rears her brood, the towering spires of temples to commerce and to God. The islands of the sea await your coming, and the Shoshone and Sioux stoop to gather their traps from the path of our advancement.

The time must soon come when the shining car of agricultural and mechanical industry will override aristocracies, and humble the pride of kings. When the clamors of war shall be drowned amid the peans that will arise in praise of peace-when nations, recognizing the true arbiter of political elevation, shall consign their battle-flags to the flames and "learn war no more."

"Then peace on earth shall hold an easy sway,

And man forget his brother man to slay,

To martial arts shall milder arts succeed,
Who blesses most shall gain the immortal meed.
The eye of pity shall be pained no more
With victory's crimson banner stained with gore.
Thou glorious era, come! Hail! blessed time!
When full-orbed freedom shall unclouded shine,
When the chaste muses, cherished by her rays
In olive groves, shall tune their sweetest lays,
When bounteous Ceres shall direct her car
O'er fields now blasted with the fires of war,
And angels view, with joy and wonder joined,
The golden age returned to bless mankind."

ADDRESS

DELIVERED BEFORE THE CHAUTAUQUA FARMERS' AND MECHANICS' UNION, BY O. W. JOHNSON, ESQ., OF FREDONIA, AT THE SEVENTH ANNUAL FAIR OF THE SOCIETY, AT FREDONIA, OCTOBER 7, 1865.

Mr. President and Fellow Citizens:

This is your Seventh Annual Fair. Never have you assembled on these beautiful grounds when you had more occasion for gratitude and rejoicing. Industry in every department has been amply rewarded, and a fruitful season has again filled your garners to overflowing. The period since your last meeting has been replete with great events. War has ceased, and instead of the roar of artillery and the clash of arms, we hear the echoes of the song once sung by the angels: "Peace on earth and good will to men." The cheering conviction has come to every soul that the unity and indivisibility of the great American Republic is assured forever, and that the most energetic people the world has known, with the most perfect social institutions, are here to develop from age to age the best fruits of humanity, and the most magnificent domain God has ever given to any nation. A million of men are released from wasting war, and the energy that has made a hundred hard fought fields glorious, is now employed in every department of productive industry. I see before me faces bronzed. by exposure to southern suns-the faces of those who have returned from the triumphs of war to add to and to enjoy the more blessed fruits of peace; and they remind us of their companions in arms, the noble dead, some of whom have been conspicuous in your organization, but who will act with you no more. The sear and yellow leaves of autumn are falling around us, yet spring will again clothe the trees with beauty, verdure will spring up again over the desolating track of armies, cities rise, phoenix-like, from their ashes, but no power can restore the dead; they are the great, the irreparable loss of war. For the promise of a life they leave the inspiration of a hallowed memory upon the earth. An era of suffering, of waste, of sorrow has closed and passed into history, to be followed, as we hope, by another era to contrast with the past as day does with night.

Agriculture is the means by which the one thousand millions of the human family receive their daily bread. The first man was placed in a garden to keep and tend it, and went from it to till the ground under the sentence, for himself and his posterity, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the ground, for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return." The patriarchs of the ancient world appear to us in the primal bloom and luxuriance of nature, spreading their tents and watering their flocks and herds by the sparkling fountains, or upon the banks of the great rivers. Man is given dominion over the earth, and every form of animal life. The earth is his inheritance. His reason is given to him that [AG.] 43