STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 101 



whether the child knew there was such a word as 'en-to-mol-o-gy ' or 

 not! 



" The hard-working American people want to know something 

 about our continent — our life-work, our bodies, and bones, and souls, 

 our duties and destinies in the great republic in which we live. 



" I look upon the agricultural classes to lift us out of this monkey- 

 dom of precedent into the true freedom of American citizenship. All 

 that is needed is that every man should quietly set about improving 

 his own school, in his own district, as fast and as fully as he can." 



I shall make no apology for quoting these educational authorities. 

 I warn all those classes who do not believe in industrial education, 

 that Broderick's words are fast coming to be true, that " working men 

 will rule this nation." The State Superintendent of Public Instruc- 

 tion in Connecticut, Mr. Northrop (and he has been saying these 

 things from that office a good many years), says : " Every child's edu- 

 cation is deficient who has not learned to work at some useful form 

 of industry. Labor aids in disciplining the intellect and energizing 

 the character. Especially does farm work Aask and test the mind, 

 leading a boy to plan and contrive to adapt means to ends ; with all 

 our approved gymnastics, none is better than manual labor cheerfully 

 and intelligently performed, especially farm work. The ambition 

 for easier lives and more genteel employments, and the silly but 

 common notion that labor is menial — that the tools of the trades and 

 the farms are badges of servility — have greatty lessened apprentice- 

 ships, and ought to be refuted in our common schools. 



" Our youth should there be taught the dignity and necessity of 

 labor, and its vital relations to all human excellence and progress, 

 the evils of indolence, the absurdity of the present fashion for city 

 life, and the wide-spread aversion to manual labor. A practical 

 knowledge of some industrial pursuit is an important element in 

 intellectual culture." 



I fully indorse these sentiments. " Whatever you would have 

 appear in a nation's life must be put into its schools," is a Prussian 

 motto, and we put the same idea into section one thousand seven 

 hundred and two of our Code, which makes it "the duty of teachers 

 to instruct pupils to avoid idleness, and to train them to a comprer 

 hension of the rights, duties, and dignity of American citizenship." 

 But Prussia enforces her principles in the most universal system of 

 " real," or technical schools, which turn out able young farmers, car- 

 penters, blacksmiths, and housekeepers, and nurses, while with us it 

 all ends in an admonition to "avoid idleness." 



The State must go further than this — it must fit its children for 

 their places in the industrial ranks. The nation has two technical 

 schools — one for training of navy, the other of army officers. Each 

 State has one for the training of teachers, and a few have real train- 

 ing schools, or colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts. If these 

 are what they should be, they will do for those pursuits what West 

 Point and Annapolis do for the army and navy, viz : make men who 

 are proud of their business. I wish some of the kid-glove gentry who 

 think the base ball club and the boating club furnishes a more digni- 

 fied employment for the muscles of our young men than manual 

 labor, could have been with me at the annual examination of one of 

 the nation's training schools, where high-born and low-born, without 

 distinction of nationality or religion, learn — what? To scrub a deck, 

 to furl a sail, to use every tool in the carpenter's shop, in the black- 



