74 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Mr. W. W. Tracy followed this discussion with an informal conversational 

 address as follows, upon the general topic : 



PRACTICABILITY OF AESTHETIC CULTURE. 



In the very beginning of the history of our race the edict was given, that 

 henceforth man should live by the sweat of his brow, and ever since then he 

 has been striving to escape it, ever trying to find some way to live without 

 labor. Has he succeeded? The regular click, thud, of the spinning jenny as 

 it moves backward and forward doing, under the guidance of a single hand, 

 that which formerly required an hundred, and not only that, but doing it bet- 

 ter than they could possibly do it; the clitter clatter of the mowing machine 

 as it sweeps down in a few moments broad acres that formerly required days 

 of most laborious toil; the busy hum of the sewing machine, heard now in 

 most of our homes, all answer Yes ; but the weary, tired look on the faces of 

 the thousands of operatives who pour out of our mills at night, after their ten, 

 twelve or fourteen hours of labor, the hurry, the drive, the overwork of our 

 farmers, which is ten-fold greater than that their fathers knew, and saddest of 

 all, the constant demand upon the time of our wives and mothers, which so 

 often prevents them from doing more than barely getting acquainted with 

 their children, all give a far louder negative answer. And this must always 

 be so, for he who gave that edict was not a man that he should lie, or the son 

 of man that his words should come to naught; and whatever man might have 

 been, he is so constituted that no sooner does he by his wit or wisdom contrive 

 some plan by which he can do in one hour the labor that formerly required an 

 hundred than some new want or desire, the gratification of which seems abso- 

 lutely essential to his comfort springs up to demand the labor of the remain- 

 ing 99. The great question then is, not how to escape labor, since that is 

 impossible, but how to get the greatest amount of good from our labor, and 

 in answering it we must remember that man's physical wants, those which he 

 has in common with the brutes must first be supplied, but that every man's 

 labor is more than enough to secure this, and it is with this surplus labor only that 

 our question lias to do. We can scarcely do better than to look for a moment how 

 this labor has been expended in the past. We read in the book written by the 

 ancient Assyrians on their palace walls of sculptured alabaster, of a people 

 fierce and warlike in character, — a people who could make it their recorded 

 boast that they made piles of the ears of their captured enemies, pyramids of 

 their hands and mountains of their heads. Surely this cannot be said to present 

 a favorable picture of the aesthetic culture of their times ; yet in the ruins of the 

 cities, which after lying buried for ages are exposed by modern research, we 

 find so much of beauty and grace that men familiar with all the elegancies of 

 modern life could only exclaim in astonishment — here is very wantonness of 

 ornament and beauty. Ancient Rome was so full of painting and statuary 

 that they tell us the modern city is built of the broken fragments of sculp- 

 tured marble that formed the ornaments of the ancient; and Prescott has no 

 more eloquent words than those in which he describes the gorgeous robes of 

 humming-birds' feathers worn by the kings of the ancient Aztecs, and of the 

 profusion of graceful ornaments found on all their works. We are certainly 

 speaking within bounds when we say that if we may judge by what they 

 have left us, fully one-half of all the labor of the past has been expended for 

 the sake of the beautiful. 



But ours is an utilitarian age, and in it, among our busy, hard-working, 



