The support of the poor [he wrote to Richard Jackson] should not be by maintaining them in idleness, but by employing them in some kind of labour suited to their abilities of body, as I am informed begins to be of late the practice in many parts of England, where workhouses are erected for that purpose. If these were general, I should think the poor would be more careful, and work voluntarily to lay up something for themselves against a rainy day, rather than run the risk of being obliged to work at the pleasure of others for a bare subsistence, and that too under confinement. For Agriculture, Franklin always had an appreciative word. "Agriculture," he observed in a letter to Cadwallader Evans, "is truly _productive of new wealth_; manufacturers only change forms, and, whatever value they give to the materials they work upon, they in the meantime consume an equal value in provisions, &c." His other observations on Agriculture are worthy of being read for the light that they cast on his own character, if for no other reason. It is, he declared, in a letter to Jonathan Shipley, "the most useful, the most independent, and therefore the noblest of Employments." Another remark of his in his _Positions to be Examined, Concerning National Wealth_ is that there seemed to him but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth: The first is by _war_, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is _robbery_. The second by _commerce_, which is _generally_ cheating. The third by _agriculture_, the only _honest way_, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favour, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry. The same spirit gives life to the following observations too in his essay on "The Internal State of America": "The Agriculture and Fisheries of the United States are the great Sources of our Encreasing Wealth. He that puts a Seed into the Earth is recompens'd, perhaps, by receiving twenty out of it; and he who draws a Fish out of our Waters, draws up a Piece of Silver." In Franklin's time as now there was a feeling that the farmer did not receive his full share of the blessings of organized society. In his _Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor_, he makes a farmer say, "I am one of that class of people, that feeds you all, and at present is abused by you all. In short I am a _farmer_."