In every College and University, a
professorship of agriculture, and the class of its students, might be
honored as the first. Young men closing their academical education with
this, as the crown of all other sciences, fascinated with its solid
charms, and at a time when they are to choose an occupation, instead of
crowding the other classes, would return to the farms of their fathers,
their own, or those of others, and replenish and invigorate a calling,
now languishing under contempt and oppression. The charitable schools,
instead of storing their pupils with a lore which the present state of
society does not call for, converted into schools of agriculture, might
restore them to that branch, qualified to enrich and honor themselves,
and to increase the productions of the nation instead of consuming them.
A gradual abolition of the useless offices, so much accumulated in all
governments, might close this drain also from the labors of the field,
and lessen the burthens imposed on them. By these, and the better means
which will occur to others, the surcharge of the learned, might in
time be drawn off to recruit the laboring class of citizenss the sum of
industry be increased, and that of misery diminished.
Among the ancients, the redundance of population was sometimes checked
by exposing infants. To the moderns, America has offered a more humane
resource. Many, who cannot find employment in Europe, accordingly come
here.
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