208 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



will ask for you, and try to answer as best I can. You want me to give my 

 opinion as to whether a young man wlio receives such an education as I have 

 been advocating will be as likely to take to farming as he would have been 

 without the education? Well, candidly, under present circumstances I do not 

 think he would, and yet I think the educated young man would be much more 

 likely to take to farming to-day than he would have been ten or twenty years 

 ago, and I think that in less than twenty years to come the farmer who has a 

 boy that he expects to inherit his farm will see to it that that boy has at least 

 as good an education as any of tlie boys in the neighborhood who are going to 

 fit themselves for the professions of theology, medicine or law ; and that the 

 question then will never be asked in regard to whether sucli an education 

 would be likely to prevent him from becoming a farmer. It will be regai'ded 

 as sufficient that he needs it as a man. If to-day a young man is less likely to 

 become a farmer because he has been liberally educated, it is not the education 

 that is at fault so much as the erroneous ideas that prevail both in regard to 

 education and farming. In all the past history of the race it has been expected 

 that education would create and develop a distaste for labor. The educated 

 man must not soil his hands with work or degrade his intellect with the ordi- 

 nary affairs of life. The idea that an education is to enable a man to make 

 labor productive of larger and better results is a comparatively new thing under 

 the sun. It is but of yesterday, and not only farmers, but a great many people 

 who are not farmers, have yet to be educated up to it. Last winter I gave a 

 lecture at one of our Institutes in which I said considerable in regard to this 

 aspect of an education. At the close of one of our meetings a j'oung man 

 came up to me and expressed his approbation of what I had said in regard to 

 education enabling a man to labor more intelligently and effectively. I found 

 on talking with him that he had just graduated from the University of our 

 own State, first in the literary department and then in the department of engi- 

 neering, and said he "I have come home to be a farmer, and my neighbors 

 seem to think that if I will stay on the farm all the time and money spent on 

 my education is so much thrown away, but I mean to teach tliem that they 

 are mistaken before I get through," and I should judge from his appearance 

 that he is quite competent to do that. 



Whatever may be the effect of a liberal education upon our young men, 

 this one thing is very evident, that many of our educated men who are not 

 young and who have been eminently successful in their respective callings, 

 develop as they grow older a strong liking for agriculture. I need not point 

 out to you individually the many eminent statesmen, lawyers, merchants, phy- 

 sicians, railroad superintendents, lumbermen, bankers, editors, and even cler- 

 gymen, who to-day are taking an active interest in agriculture, and who are 

 really doing more for its advancement than any other class of men. One has 

 a fancy in the direction of a fine horse and he makes a specialty of the im- 

 provement of that noble animal ; others like the firm of Avery & Murphy, 

 undertake the improvement of Short-horns, and import into our State some 

 of the best Short-horn blood in the world. The late Gov. Crapo did the same 

 for the Herefords. Others, as Hon. "Wm. Webber, Judge Marston, and many 

 others, are doing the same with different dairy breeds. Another, like Hon. A. 

 B. Maynard, takes hold of a miserable place that he has told us could raise 

 nothing but "mullein stalks and mortgages," and he makes it one of the 

 most productive farms in the county of Macomb. The late Senator Chandler, 

 when in Europe a number of years ago, became much interested in the recla- 

 mation of what is known as the Harlem flats from which the sea has been shut 



