What They Said

    "Still more hopeless is the promise of the manufacturing mania, "that it will make us independent of foreign nations," when combined with its other promise of providing a market for agriculture.  The promise of a market, as we see in the experience of England, can only be made good, by reducing the agricultural class to a tenth part of the nation, and increasing manufacturers by great manufactural exportations.  This reduction can only be accomplished by driving or seducing above nine-tenths of the agricultural class, into other classes, and the increase by a brave and patriotic navy.  Discontent and misery will be the fruits of the first operation, and these would constitute the most forlorn hope for success in the second.  By exchanging hardy, honest and free husbandmen for the classes necessary to reduce the number of agriculturalists, low enough to raise the prices of their products shall we become more independent of foreign nations?  What!  Secure our independence by bankers and capitalists?  Secure our independence by impoverishing discouraging and annihilating none-tenths of our sound yeomanry?  By turning them into swindlers, and dependents on a master capitalist for daily bread?

    The manufacturing mania accuses the agricultural spirit of avarice and want of patriotism, whilst it offers to bribe it by  a prospect of better prices, whittles down independence into cargoes of fancy goods, and proposes to metamorphose nine-tenths of the hardy sons of the forest into everything but heroes, for the grand end of gratifying the avarice of a capitalist, monied or paper interest"

"The political causes which oppress agriculture have been considered, before domestic habits which vitiate it, to guard against the error of an opinion, that the latter may be removed, whilst the former continue.  So long as the laws make it more profitable to invest capital in speculations without labour, than in agriculture with labour; and so long as the liberty of pursuing one's own interest exist; the two strongest human propensities, a love of wealth, and a love of ease, will render it impossible"

"The capacity of agriculture for affording luxuries to the body, is not less conspicuous than its capacity for affording luxuries to the mind;  it being a science singularly possessing the double qualities of feeding with unbounded liberality, both the moral appetites of the one and the physical wants of the other.  It can even feed a morbid love of money, whilst it is habituating us to the practice of virtue; and whilst it provides for the wants of the philosopher, it affords him ample room for the most curious yet useful researches.  In short, by the exercise it gives both to the body and to the mind, it secures health and vigor to both; and by combining a thorough knowledge of the real affairs of life, with a necessity for investigating the arcana of nature, and the strongest invitations to the practice of morality, it becomes the best architect of a complete man."

"Monarchies and aristocracies, being founded in the principle of distributing wealth by law, can only subsist by frauds and deceptions to dupe ignorance into an opinion, that such distributions are intended for its benefit;  but in genuine republics, founded on the principle of leaving wealth to be distributed by merit and industry, these treacheries of government are treasons against nations."