91 Transactions of the 



many years experience. Bast and West, as one of the pioneers of indus- 

 trial education. 



I might claim tor myself as early and intimate an acquaintance with 

 this pursuit as the sage of the New York Tribune, for I have plowed 

 where plowing was anything but a pleasure ride over fields of flowers, 

 and mowed among bowlders and Canada thistles, where every bushel of 

 corn cost more patience and muscle than a shipload of California's grain. 

 I could match Mr. Greeley's experience on the barren hills of New 

 Hampshire with my own on the Manor of Bensselaer. I also know the 

 hardness of farm work and its unattractiveness to the young; and yet, 

 at the summit of life, where I can survey both the ground passed over 

 and the way I have still to tread, I can say there is no calling as useful, 

 or on the whole as pleasurable, and none which, rightly understood and 

 followed, will call into so active exercise the whole range of human 

 faculties. 



I believe this is the testimony of the best minds in all ages, and 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 in the land, and how shall we raise these pursuits to the rank 

 they deserve in the hierarchy of industries?" It is useless to eulogize 

 callings whose votaries forsake them Avith every opportunity and whose 

 children turn from them with disgust. 



Congress might give every acre of the public domain to found agri- 

 cultural and industrial colleges, making them not only free, but giving 

 a bonus of public lands as a reward of attendance, and still their halls 

 will remain empty, until the relations of labor to human nature are 

 understood and carried into practice; until the farmer, out of his sense 

 of privation, loss, failure, and onesidedness, shall resolve that his chil- 

 dren be as carefully cultured as his fields, that they shall grow up in 

 pleasant homes, and be laying up. if not dollars and cents, "capital for 

 after pleasures of thought and memory." 



Let us reason together about this business of agriculture, wherein it 

 fails to meet the demands of human nature, and wiry, in California espe- 

 cially, we are looking to the lower class of foreigners for the permanent 

 tillers of our soil, and the supports of our most important industries. It 

 does not seem possible that the energizing, civilizing forces which 

 pushed westward from New England. Virginia, and Carolina, displacing 

 might}' forests by fields of waving grain, are so far spent that we must 

 depend upon other lands for their renewal. It cannot be that the old 

 spirit which planted the wilderness with homes of freemen has departed 

 from us and left nothing but greed of weath and love of show. And 

 yet, how many of the so called liberally educated men of the country 

 would be willing to look to a trade as a means of livelihood, and how 

 many young lad}' graduates of our female seminaries and high schools 

 are expecting to become farmers and mechanics' wives? We arc begin- 

 ning to see that there can be no healthy, living community without 

 plenty of farmers and mechanics, that the factory and farm must be 

 brought together, and that the salvation, not to say civilization, of Cali- 

 fornia depends upon this. 



The first thing which the European emigrant seek to possess is land. 

 It makes no difference from what part of the country he comes; Irish. 

 Welsh, Swede, or German, the sentiment has been wrought into every 

 fibre of his mental and physical constitution that he is nobody without 

 land. He sees in it the foundation of wealth, of all distinction, and 

 family pride, and not until thoroughly Americanized does he come to 



