State Agricultural Society. 419 



question of free trade, to become Chairman of a legislative committee 

 who have the pauperism, the criminality, the insanity of the State to 

 look after? Does it require years to learn how to build a house or a 

 steamship properly, or to make a machine, and neither time nor training 

 to make a just law? 



It must soon be understood and conceded that a thorough training in 

 general science, culminating in the science of life — the scientific study 

 of human nature — is essential to a right performance of any of the 

 functions of government. The reason for this is very simple. Nations 

 are only aggregates of individual life, and all this phenomena displayed 

 on the larger have their explanation in the laws which govern the 

 narrower field of individual action. Legislation will always be a series 

 of experiments, often very poor ones; it will continue to be a kind of 

 tinkering at legalized abuses, until a clear comprehension of the laws of 

 life, and the way in which these laws underlie and determine social 

 growth and organization, is obtained. 



I have lingered over these* considerations because we are so apt to 

 look only upon science as the instrument of our material prosperity, to 

 congratulate ourselves upon the way in which we have made steam and 

 electricity and various agencies lighten our muscalar labor and add to 

 our comfort — forgetting that "there is no wealth but life," including all 

 its powers of labor and of a wise enjoyment of its fruits of hibor. The 

 invention of a machine which will do the work of twenty men, though 

 it make the inventor rich and gives to each laborer a certain amount of 

 leisure, is'a questionable blessing unless this wealth and leisure become 

 means for the satisfaction of higher wants. If the sons of farmers, 

 manufacturers, and mechanics abandon their fathers' business, which 

 was the source of their wealth and leisure, and transfer all their ambi- 

 tion, influence, and power to the pursuit of rank and reputation and the 

 building up of false standards of social life, we have loss instead of gain; 

 loss in the productive and no gain to the intellectual class. In Europe 

 a mechanical pursuit, like a factory or commercial house, becomes a 

 matter of family pride and inheritance. It is plain that our well to do 

 middle classes are not as well satisfied as those of foreign lands with 

 modest competence; are not honoring their callings by a firm and digni- 

 fied adherence; but are recklessly and often ruinously following the 

 armies of speculators and spendthrifts. 



HOW SHALL W# EDUCATE ? 



The question has become one of vital importance to the nation, how 

 shall we educate our youth so that there shall be more farmers and 

 more mechanics, more producers in the land? and how shall we raise these 

 pursuits to the rank they deserve in the hierarchy of industries? It is 

 in vain, however, to eulogize callings whose votaries forsake with every 

 opportunity — whose children turn from with disgust. Congress might 

 give every acre of the public domain to found Agricultural and Indus- 

 trial Colleges, making them not only free but giving a bonus of lands as 

 the reward of attendance, and still their halls will remain emptj' until 

 the relations of labor to human nature are understood and carried into 

 practice — until the farmer and mechanic, out of their sense of priva- 

 tion, loss, failure, and onesidedness, shall resolve that his children be 

 as carefully cultured as his fields; that they shall grow up in pleasant 

 homes and be daily laying up, if not dollars and cents, "capital for after 

 pleasures of thought and memory." Let us reason together about this 



