82 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 



By Hon. J. A. Roberts, Norway. 



(Stenographic Copy.) 



Education is something in which we are all interested. We 

 feel proud of our educational system, and we appropriate large 

 sums of money every year to support it and make it better and 

 more progressive as time goes by. All people should learn to 

 read, write and spell, and use figures, and also the common busi- 

 ness forms, etc. That is education which should be acquired 

 by all people, whatever may be their calling ; but I am to speak 

 to you this morning on agricultural education. The doctor gets 

 an education that is peculiar to his business, the lawyer gets an 

 education that is peculiar to his business, and so the farmer must 

 have an education that is peculiar to his business. If we go 

 back many years, away back centuries, to those days before the 

 invention of the printing press, back to those days that we call 

 the dark ages, days that are now almost forgotten by us because 

 the light of science has illumined the world so brightly, we find 

 that the farmer and those who were engaged in any other indus- 

 trial arts in those days were people who were ignorant and lowly. 

 The gentlemen of that day, the men of influence of that day, 

 engaged in what to them seemed the noble art of war. But times 

 have changed, and now we are devoting our time and our ener- 

 gies to the cultivation of peace, and those arts and sciences that 

 put us upon a higher footing. The fact that the tillers of the soil 

 in those days were expected to be ignorant and lowly has come 

 down through the years to us. That feeling was strong every- 

 where on the continent of Europe and in England. The farmer, 

 the tiller of the soil, was not expected to have any sort of an 

 education, or but very little ; he must belong to the lowest class, 

 or one of the lower classes. They were men without influence, 

 their round of life being beaten in a circle, doing little, and hav- 

 ing no influence in the community. That idea has been handed 

 down, and even back no farther than my boyhood days farmers 



