EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. 519 



But, witli us, we feel assured that you will duly appreciate the 

 fact that the great priaciple and purpose underlying all these 

 associations, public displays, and premium lists, is to prove to 

 labor that of its own production, there is abundant material to 

 please the fancy and stisfy ambition ; and by bringing them 

 together, combined and arranged, to afford a noble opportunity 

 for study to the student, and a splendid and profitable holiday to 

 the idle. For this reason the Society seeks to please all, for it is 

 profitable for all to come. No person can leave an agricultural 

 exhibition as ignorant as he came. Its annual shows give to 

 all an opportunity to study the lesson of labor, which, perhaps, 

 but one has properly illustrated. 



To inaugerate annually a great industrial gathering, where the 

 knowledge of one may be spread over the minds of many — a 

 gathering where each may not only prove to himself his own, 

 "but mark his neighbors faults and follies," — where the incrust- 

 ation of old habits may be broken np and fallowed for new 

 ideas, proving to each that the end of knowledge is not yet 

 reached, nor the opportunity of learning lost — an annual gath- 

 ering where the industry and skill of the State may meet and 

 recite to all the years before, and the success or failure of its efforts 

 to solve that portion of the great industrial problem embraced 

 within the field of its labor. In theory each and all these seve- 

 ral steps of progress might be considered as so many evidences 

 of our progress in the primal art of arts. But practically, it is 

 not true, for the reason that most of these evidences of success 

 are the results of an accidental combination of circumstances — 

 that is, most of the evidences are not the result of the practical 

 application of known and well established principles of agricul- 

 tural science, but too often the accidental result of a thoughtless 

 combination of forces, thrown together without design, thus in 

 effect, teaching nothing conclusively ; consequently a repetition 

 almost invariably proves a failure. Improvements in agricul- 

 ture are no doubt being made ; but the laws of nature, upon 

 which all successes are based, are most of them too dimly seen 

 too conduct to a successful repetion. Consequently we are, as 

 agriculturists, constantly lalling back from each seeming advance- 



