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ics and laborers, are waking up to so deep a sense of their claims upon public 

 consideration; that they are cultivating so generally, not only the sentiments 

 but the habits of temperance and sobriety; that they are showing on every 

 hand, a strong determination to eschew, upon all proper occasions, the embit- 

 tered strife of parties. The excitement of the present day, thank a kind 

 Providence, is to see who can make two blades of grass grow where there 

 was but one before. 



One of the greatest blessings that is to follow from these exhibitions of la- 

 bor and skill, is that of an entire change in the character of the education of 

 the youth. 



The time has been when the young men of the country were sent to the 

 academy to take their places in the preparatory course, then to college, year 

 after year spent in learning a little Latin or Greek, too frequently less common 

 sense, until they become ready to graduate. With a rich colored diploma, he 

 walks forth from the college, upon the very soil from which labor is to wring 

 the bread that must support and keep him from starving, and yet in too many 

 cases, wholly ignorant of the character of the soil, and of the very trees of 

 the forest; so much so as not to be able to tell a maple from a beech tree. 



This is not a mere sketch of fancy. I was credibly informed, that a few 

 years ago, a graduate settled in one of our western towns, folloAving one of 

 the learned professions. Returning home he lost a shoe from his horse. He 

 gathered up the handle of a skillet that had been broken off, to take to the 

 blacksmith to make a new shoe. 



You perceive the term learned professions has been used — one common 

 with public speakers: It is to be found in the very forms prescribed by the 

 General Government for taking the census. 



By the census of 1850, there are about sixty-five thousand of the learned 

 professions, out of a population of twenty-three millions. It is a term of re- 

 proach, and will remain so, until it is extended to include the farmer and 

 mechanic. 



The farmer, of all men, should be included in the term learned profession. 

 He is the great physician of nature. If however, he is ignorant of the laws of 

 nature, of the proper treatment to effect a cure when disease affects his patients 

 he is, of all men on earth, the greatest quack. There is this difference, how- 

 ever, between the quack farmer and quack physician : the farmer's patient 

 has so good a constitution that it ts difficult to kill him off. If his constitu- 

 tion was not good, in many cases in Indiana, the patient would long since 

 have been dead and buried, and briers, thorns, and thistles, taken his place. 



A case in point came under my own observation, which has numerous du- 

 plicates throughout the country. In passing by a neighbor's farm on the "Wa- 

 bash some years since, I found him laying the foundation upon which to 

 build his stable and barn. It was situated on a high ridge, near the side im- 

 mediately above a spring. "When interrogated as to his object in thus build- 

 ing, his reply was, that the manure would wash away from his stable. The same 

 day his sou was hauling away the straw from where his wheat had been 



