They are not brilliant, nor are they highly refined; they know nothing
of arts, histrionic or dramatic; they know only so much of older nations
as their histories and newspapers teach them; in the fashionable world
they hold no place;--but in energy, in industry, in hardy virtue, in
substantial knowledge, and in manly independence, they make up a race
that is hard to be matched.
The French peasantry are, in all the essentials of intelligence and
sterling worth, infants compared with them; and the farmers of England
are either the merest 'ockeys in grain, with few ideas beyond their
sacks, samples, and market-days,--or, with added cultivation, they lose
their independence in a subserviency to some neighbor patron of rank;
and superior intelligence teaches them no lesson so quickly as that
their brethren of the glebe are unequal to them, and are to be left to
their cattle and the goad.
There are English farmers indeed, who are men in earnest, who read the
papers, and who keep the current of the year's intelligence; but such
men are the exceptions. In New England, with the school upon every third
hill-side, and the self-regulating, free-acting church to watch every
valley with week-day quiet, and to wake every valley with Sabbath sound,
the men become, as a class, bold, intelligent, and honest actors, who
would make again, as they have made before, a terrible army of
defence,--and who would find reasons for their actions as strong as
their armies.
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