He then sketched his own ideal of a rural population, an ideal obviously based on free labor and free institutions. "You make a settler on the domain," said he, "a better citizen of the community. He becomes better qualified to discharge the duties of a freeman. He is, in fact, the representative of his own homestead, and is a man in the enlarged and proper sense of the term. He comes to the ballot-box and votes without the fear or the restraint of some landlord. After the hurry and bustle of election day are over, he mounts his own horse, returns to his own domicil, goes to his own barn, feeds his own stock. His wife turns out and milks their own cows, churns their own butter; and when the rural repast is ready, he and his wife and their children sit down at the same table together to enjoy the sweet product of their own hands, with hearts thankful to God for having cast their lots in this country where the land is made free under the protecting and fostering care of a beneficent Government." The picture thus presented by Johnson was not the picture of a home in the slave States, and no one knew better than he that it was a home which could not be developed and established amid the surroundings and the influences of slavery. It was a home in the North-West, and not in the South-West. Proceeding in his speech Johnson became still more warmly enamored of his hero on the homestead, and with a tongue that seemed touched with the gift of prophecy he painted him in the possible career of a not distant future. "It has long been near my heart," said he in the House of Representatives in July, 1850, "to see every man in the United States domiciled. Once accomplished, it would create the strongest tie between the citizen and the Government; what a great incentive it would afford to the citizen to obey every call of duty! At the first summons of the note of war you would find him leaving his plow in the half-finished furrow, taking his only horse and converting him into a war-steed: his scythe and sickle would be thrown aside, and with a heart full of valor and patriotism he would rush with alacrity to the standard of his country."