STATE HOETICULTUllAL SOCIETY. 225 



attaining some position. Notvvitlistanding the popularity of the ques- 

 tion, I have received as much mean treatment for doing this as I have 

 done for being an abolitionist. I have been contemned and derided for 

 advocating this — for teUing the people to come out and say what they 

 need to know. Not what a classical man would love to teach them, but 

 leavino- many of these things, when the limit of three score years and 

 ten does not allow a man to spend ten or fifteen years in classics, and 

 then set about digging in the dirt and doing all these things ; he will 

 have been so much engaged in acquiring knowledge that is not neces- 

 sary for him, that he does not fall to the other properly. The lectures 

 that we have heard here, at the same time that they have demonstrated 

 that the understanding of the laws of light, and vegetable growth, and 

 social intercourse, are imperative, show clearly that a classical knowl- 

 edge, great and good as it is esteemed by many of our eminent men, has 

 no tendency to develop this knowledge. Why has it not, in the two 

 thousand years that it has gone on, spread out a knowledge of agricul- 

 ture or the mechanic arts, as more important than anything that has 

 ever been known ? Why is it that it does not do this ? I do not care 

 how classical your education — if the farmers and machinists stop, we 

 are gone. It is imperative that we have our own farmers educated in 

 these things. Look at the productions of the soil: wheat has gone 

 down fifty per cent, corn nearly in the same ratio. I remember the time 

 when we could go next summer and reap 30 to 50 bushels per acre with 

 much more certainty than we can now. We use up our fields and go 

 further west, instead of improving our land by scientific farming. How 

 much further west will you go ? One more State to the southwest, and 

 we get to the verge of civilization. At the present rate of progress in 

 destroying our soil, in less than 75 years the question will be : Where 

 shall we get bread to put in our mouths ? The Almighty did not see fit 

 to make another Mississippi valley in any part of the world. If we 

 despoil this territory, woe be to us. 



Notwithstanding the projectors of this scheme might be poor unin-' 

 structed dunces, they cast about and they thought we ought to have such 

 knowledge of geology as was eliminated by the professors here the other 



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