302 TRANSACTIONS OF THE HORnCULTURAL 



pand the moral and spiritual faculties, as the school and home do 

 the mental and physical. With the home, the school, and the 

 church, then, largely rest the hope, honor and perpetuity of the 

 nation. 



Human nature is so constituted that it is always impressed by 

 the true, beautiful and good. People of all ages, nationalities, and 

 beliefs, admire, and more or less are swayed and influenced in their 

 habits and actions by these qualities. The principal office of the 

 beautiful is to please, and by thus pleasing, attract influence and 

 soften. Its influence upon all people is the same in general. The 

 only difference being the means employed necessary to affect, or pro- 

 duce its influence upon the young or old, cultured or uncultured, 

 civilized or savage, as the case may be. 



The people of the country need the very best talent to preside in 

 their churches and school houses that their means and circumstances 

 will permit them to secure; and that while the proper and reasonable 

 ornamentation of their church and school buildings and grounds 

 will at least be no hindrance to securing first class preachers and 

 teachers, but rather to aid in this regard, its tendency will be to re- 

 fine, elevate and cement together the interests of the membership of 

 the church and the pupils and patrons of the school; and the reflex 

 influence on the community at large will be for the good thrift and 

 enterprise of its people. Don't understand me to say or mean that 

 any and every community that has a beautiful church building and 

 grounds wnll always, as a result, have an able pastor and a thoroughly 

 religious, harmonious and brotherly-love-like congregation; or that 

 every district that has a fine school house, with handsome fence and 

 neat yard about it, will ever be supplied with a teacher competent 

 and willing to always perform any and all the duties and things 

 necessary to constantly advance all his pupils; to always have per- 

 fect order and tranquility in the school room; to please and satisfy 

 every patron of the school, and to preserve a thorough peace and 

 amiability of feeling throughout the neighborhood. Oh, no; we 

 are to require no impossibilities of human effort. 



But I do mean to say that the district that has a neat, commodious 

 well-ventilated and w^ell-warmed school house, with its surroundings 

 judiciously planted to shade trees, and its yard handsomely laid off 

 and tastefully planted to shrubs and flowers will be more apt, in the 

 first place, to secure the right kind of a teacher than the district that 

 has its little, dingy, unpainted, unkept school house, located on the 

 muddy corner of some flat prairie farm, with not a tree or shrub 

 within five miles of it, save perhaps a swamp willow or two growing 

 in the edge of the frog pond adjacent. 



Of late years school money has been expended in many ways 

 which, if done in the olden times, would have been thought wanton 

 extravagance and needless waste. Among other things for which 

 these funds have been so expended, I note school charts of various 



