President Earless Address. 39 



-world, if carried on with a faithful spirit. The results of our work con- 

 tribute directly and powerfully to the betterment of mankind. We min- 

 ister to the health and the moral stature of the community. I would have 

 every horticulturist regard his vocation with becoming pride. We work 

 with the great forces of nature. We form alliances with the sunshine and 

 the rain, and the secret affinities of the soil. We manipulate the occult en- 

 ergies of chemistry. We join hands with Providence to produce our har- 

 vests. The American fruit-grower, like the American farmer, should hold 

 his head proudly, but reverently, as the best man of the world. As I look 

 at it, there is no man on earth that outranks the well equipped and com- 

 petent American farmer and American fruit-farmer. But equipment of 

 knowledge and intellectual competency mean a great deal. 



THE NEED OF BROAD CULTURE. 



The successful and ideal farmer must be a man of culture and of science, 

 must have a wide knowledge of the world, its great industries, its history, 

 its commercial needs. He must be a power in the community and in the 

 state. Are we taking the necessary educational steps to produce such 

 farmers ? There is no question which a convention of horticulturists, rep- 

 resenting every section of our country, can more appropriately consider 

 than that of the facilities we are providing for the education of the American 

 farmer as he should be. We have the foundation for the best educational 

 system of any nation in the world, and we have a more earnest general 

 desire to find the best kind of education. Our farmers and our agricultural 

 writers are more widely imbued with this desire than this same class in any 

 other country. 



Yet I fear that the present tendency is to place our standard too low. 

 I am greatly in sympathy with our agricultural colleges and with the in- 

 dustrial departments of our universities, but I can not join in the general 

 criticism of those institutions which attempt to give a generous literary 

 culture as well as a good technical training. In fact, I feel like protesting 

 earnestly against the general trend of the discussion in the agricultural press 

 toward a purely technical, manual, industrial education. 



The American farmer should be the most liberally educated and broadly 

 cultured man in the American state. The farmers as a class far outnumber 

 the class of manufacturers, or of merchants, or of professional men, or of all 

 these classes together, and yet they have less influence in molding the in- 

 dustrial and political policies that govern us than either one of these other 

 classes. Why is this, except that the farmer has learned how to plow and 

 to mow and to dig ditches better than he has learned how to think ? His 

 education has been too generally confined to those rudiments necessary to 

 give him practical success as a farmer in a narrow sphere. And here come 

 the doctrinaires of the new industrial education and propose the same pol- 

 icy for our agricultural colleges, only in a larger degree. 



