The unceasing desire to become richer would be, however, but a mitigated evil, if men sought only wealth by production.  The aggravation of the case is, that they whom the desire most impels, seek the increase of their own store, not by producing, but by contriving to turn to their own stock the avails of the industry of others.  Our young men, in deplorable numbers, slide into the persuasion, that any means of living and thriving are better than productive industry.  Hence the rush into trade, the professions, into speculations, where the hazards are such, that the cool calculations of pure avarice would rather incline a man to prefer the prospect of growing rich by digging the earth.  So much the preference of contrivance to labor overmaster the mastering desire to become rich.

But there is a strange hankering after whatever is of the nature of a lottery.  So the prizes are but splendid, no matter, if they are but few compared with the blanks.  We are given to presuming each on his own good fortune.  “Nothing venture, nothing have,” has become a proverb.  So agriculture is treated as if it had no rewards, because one ventures so little by engaging therein.  And one might almost think that the conscious earth resented the indignity.

Aided by Philosophy, we shall argue on this matter thus:  All cannot live by their wits; the many must produce with the hands; and, the greater the part who shuffle off the charge, the more heavily it falls on others.  The first law given to man in innocency, was, to keep the garden and till it; the first after the loss of innocency, “In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread;”—­so a dispensation from such law, given by Him, who best knows what is good for man, in whatever state, is not worthy to stand high among life’s blessings.

More particularly we are taught in the same school, that the good thus contemplated must cost something at least on the score of that best of physical enjoyments—­health.  If it were duly appreciated, how high this stands among life’s goods, and how much its perfection depends on freedom to the mind from the anxieties of hazardous speculation, and a goodly amount of manly labor, of which the varied occupations of agriculture are the most favorable of all; this consideration would check the prevalent ambition to make the contrivance of the brain supply the place of the labor of the hands.

Health is commended to us, not only as among the first of present goods, but as one, the security of which is placed very much in our own power; if we will but study and practise the means.  It is remarkable, that, while the healing art is proverbial for its sects and uncertainties—­amid the disputes of homoeopaths and allopaths, mineralists and herbalists, stimulators and depletors—­there is a pretty general agreement of parties on the laws of hygiene, or the art of preserving health.  We might find here a law, taught by the constitution of nature, that its Author never intended healing to hold an important place in the cause of human welfare.  He meant it should be well nigh dispensed with, by the obedience men should pay to laws, which they may understand.