Original Document

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859



...No other human occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated thought, as agriculture. I know of nothing so pleasant to the mind, as the discovery of anything with is at once so new and valuable–nothing which so lightens and sweetens toil, as the hopeful pursuit of such discovery.



And how vast, and how varied a field is agriculture, for such discovery. The mind, already trained to thought, in the country school, or higher school, cannot fail to find there an exhaustless source of profitable enjoyment. ...



It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!...And yet let us hope it not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral worlds within us, we shall secure an individual, social and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.