The final culmination of this vast and varied Republic will be the
production and perennial establishment of millions of comfortable city
homesteads and moderate-sized farms, healthy and independent, single
separate ownership, fee simple, life in them complete but cheap, within
reach of all. Exceptional wealth, splendor, countless manufactures,
excess of exports, immense capital and capitalists, the
five-dollar-a-day hotels well fill'd, artificial improvements, even
books, colleges, and the suffrage--all, in many respects, in themselves,
(hard as it is to say so, and sharp as a surgeon's lance,) form, more or
less, a sort of anti-democratic disease and monstrosity, except as
they contribute by curious indirections to that culmination--seem to me
mainly of value, or worth consideration, only with reference to it.
There is a subtle something in the common earth, crops, cattle, air,
trees, &c., and in having to do at first hand with them, that forms the
only purifying and perennial element for individuals and for society.
I must confess I want to see the agricultural occupation of America at
first hand permanently broaden'd. Its gains are the only ones on which
God seems to smile. What others--what business, profit, wealth, without
a taint? What fortune else--what dollar--does not stand for, and come
from, more or less imposition, lying, unnaturalness?