Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that
it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve
them.
When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we
shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they
do there.
Health, learning, and virtue will insure your happiness; they will give
you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honor.
If I were to decide between the pleasures derived from the classical
education which my father gave me, and the estate left me, I should
decide in favor of the farmer.
Good humor and politeness never introduce into mixed society a question
on which they foresee there will be a difference of opinion.
The general desire of men to live by their heads rather than their
hands, and the strong allurements of great cities to those who have
any turn for dissipation, threaten to make them here, as in Europe, the
sinks of voluntary misery.
I have often thought that if Heaven had given me choice of my position
and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered,
and near a good market for the productions of the garden. No occupation
is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture
comparable to that of the garden.
I sincerely, then, believe with you in the general existence of a moral
instinct. I think it is the brightest gem with which the human character
is studded, and the want of it as more degrading than the most hideous
of the bodily deformities.
I must ever believe that religion substantially good, which produces
an honest life, and we have been authorized by one (One) whom you and I
equally respect, to judge of the tree by its fruit.
Where the law of majority ceases to be acknowledged there government
ends, the law of the strongest takes its place, and life and property
are his who can take them.
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He
has a chosen people, whose breasts he has made this peculiar deposit for
substantial and genuine virtue, it is the focus in which He keeps alive
that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the
earth.
The wise know their weakness too well to assume infallibility; and he
who knows most knows best how little he knows.