THE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY AT DERBY.*

AFTER acknowledging the toast given by the chair in honor of the United States and the American minister, Mr Everett proceeded as follows:

You have done me, my lord, no more than justice, in ascribing to me the kindest feelings towards the land of my fathers. I am a great believer in the efficacy of race and blood, as far as nations are concerned. I have no idea that this is a matter which is important solely in reference to short horns and Herefords, or to South Downs and Leicesters. History warrants us in believing in races of men, as well as of inferior animals; and what I have been accustomed to say at home I may without impropriety repeat here. I am decidedly of opinion that the Anglo-Saxon race, from which we Americans trace our descent, is surpassed by none other that ever existed. Attached as I am- ardently attached to my native land, desirous of serving her to the utmost of an humble capacity, willing if need be to fall in her defence, I yet rejoice that my ancestors were the countrymen of yours, the sons of England. The sound of my native language beyond the sea is music in my ears. I rejoice, in speaking my mother tongue, that I speak the language also of a great and kindred free people. And if there is any occasion which may with propriety bring us together as brethren of one national family, it is certainly a meeting like this, composed of persons who are devoted to the cultivation of

* In reply to a complimentary toast from the president (the Earl of Hardwicke) at the public dinner of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, at Derby, on the 13th of July, 1843.

the great parent art of agriculture the common interest of all civilized nations. It is truly the art of peace. The highest authority has taught us that when the happy time shall arrive, that nations shall cease to learn war any more, they shall beat their swords into ploughshares; and I am convinced, if a hundredth part of the skill, the energy, and the treasure that have been expended in the fierce and deadly struggles of what is commonly called the "field," had been employed in a generous emulation which should excel the rest in the peaceful art to which this society is devoted, that you farmers would have superseded us diplomatists; or, at any rate, that very little would be left to be done in the way of angry international discussions.

Your lordship has alluded to the important commercial relations of the two countries. They are undoubtedly of great magnitude, and destined, no doubt, to be much augmented. I am certainly very sensible to the importance of the commerce of such a country as England or the United States. But in this connection, I was led, by the remarks which fell from the chair last evening on the vast importance of the agricultural interest, to ask myself a question, as to the relative magnitude of the commerce and agriculture of Great Britain. You are aware that the entire commerce carried on by Great Britain and the United States, — by which I mean the aggregate of your exports to that country and your imports from it, is fully twice as large as your commerce with any other country. And yet what is its annual amount? Its annual value is about equal to that of the crop of oats and beans in Great Britain, as given on the authority of Mr McCulloch, in the essay of Mr Pusey which your lordship cited last evening. These two articles of agricultural produce alone are equal to the exports and imports exchanged by the United States and Great Britain. I will adduce one more fact of a similar character. The whole foreign commerce of Great Britain, for which you overshadow the ocean with your fleets, and plant your colonies in the remotest corners of the globe, is actually surpassed in value by the annual crop of grass in the British Islands.

It would not become me, I will not say as a stranger, for you have courteously forbidden me to regard myself in that light, but as your guest, to enter into details in reference to the various objects which have received your attention at the present meeting. I will say, however, that in examining the show of implements, and the stock yard this morning, it occurred to me, that whatever ground of complaint may at any former periods have existed in any branch of your husbandry, (for such complaints I find in your agricultural works,) there is certainly little apparent ground for similar complaints at the present day, as far as a judgment can be formed from this year's exhibition. It seemed to me, as I made the circuit, that there was evidence of an amount of science, of mechanical skill, of practical sagacity, — of countenance and sympathy on the part of the higher orders, of diligence and thrift on the part of the laboring classes, — all in a degree of close combination for the promotion of agricultural improvement which I have nowhere else seen equalled. If great advances in husbandry are practicable, it would seem impossible that they should not be made, under the encouragements and appliances which are now brought to bear upon the subject.

It is a somewhat remarkable fact, if I may be pardoned so general a reflection, that till quite lately, all the great improvements in agriculture seem to have been made in the very infancy of mankind. Who can tell when that humble instrument was invented which lies at the basis of all civilization? -I mean the plough. Who can tell when man first called in, as the humble partners of his toils, the horse, the ox, the cow, the swine, the sheep, and raised them to a profitable alliance with himself? I do not know that in the entire period embraced by authentic history, one has been added to the list of the domesticated animals. If it were possible to find out the man who caught the first wild dog, and taught it to share the shepherd's labors, he would deserve a nobler monument than ever was raised to monarch or conqueror. Who is able, at this date of the world's history, to tell when the olive and the vine, when any of the cereal grains, or

generous fruits, or the esculent roots were first brought to their present condition? There is but one of these the potato- of which the history is known. The story of the rest runs back into those recesses of antiquity, into which we cannot penetrate. These products were first cultivated in ages when our common ancestors were roaming as painted savages over the wild hills and moors of this now beautiful and merry England, and when even the primitive inhabitants of Greece and Rome were subsisting upon beech nuts and

acorns.

It would seem, in fact, that men, in their agricultural progress, had followed, to some extent, that curious law of nature, so happily illustrated at the council dinner yesterday by Professor Owen, which exists in reference to some of the ruminating animals within the tropics. He told us that some of these have a large hump of fat between the shoulders, which during the first half of the year is nourished, and attains a great size, by the abundance of food then existing. On the store of fat thus laid aside, as it were, for a season of scarcity, the animal subsists for the rest of the year, when the ground is parched, and the herbage fails. Such seems to have been very much the case of the civilized nations, in reference to their advances in agriculture. In the infancy of the race they made these great improvements - pressed the olive and the grape, tamed the ox and the horse, contrived the plough, educated a few wild grasses into nutritious grains; in a word, accumulated a lump of fat like that described by Professor Owen, and have been living upon it almost ever since. Virgil, in the Georgics, describes to us the plough, as it was made in his day; and the self-same plough which he describes is still to be seen, after seventeen centuries, in use in the south of Europe. We can still see Virgil's plough in bas relief, in the marble relics of ancient art; and truly, for any improvement which has taken place in seventeen hundred years, the ploughman on the marble has done as much as the living ploughman in the field. We may certainly boast that the revival of agricultural life and energy, in these latter days, is due to that Anglo-Saxon race of which you, my

lord, have just spoken. It has been left to you, and, if you will allow me to say so, to us, living though we do in these austere climes, and beneath these ungenial skies, which are now weeping as if in penitence for their own rigor,*—it has been left to you and to us to accomplish what they have not even attempted beneath the unclouded suns of Italy and Greece. And do we not owe our superiority in this respect to the want among us of those tropical luxuries, the absence of the balmy but enervating breezes of the south, the enjoyment of which would have cost us that hardihood of frame and energy of will, which are worth all the spices and perfumes of Arabia?

"Man is the nobler growth our soil supplies,

And souls are ripened in our northern skies."

I beg pardon of the company and your lordship for the length of time during which I have detained you. I thank you for the indulgence with which you have heard me ; and I beg to assure you that when these shouts of approbation shall be heard across the Atlantic, as they will be in fourteen or fifteen days, a response as cordial will be returned by my countrymen.

* The rain was falling in torrents upon the canvas roof of the pavillion in which the company were assembled.