No. 85. j 57 



reeled industry, will also qualify him to keep and enjoy a much larger 

 portion of the nett proceeds of his labor. 



Your committee have been constrained to believe that much of the 

 opposition to agricultural schools in this State, has arisen from the 

 well grounded apprehension that if we place the farmers of New- 

 York on a par with professional men, in point of attainments, they 

 will cut off at the fountain the large fortunes which now flow into the 

 hands of men who really produce less than they consume. 



These educated farmers will demand, it is feared, an equal share ol 

 the honors that accrue to our executive, judicial and legislative offi- 

 cers, and hence the light of science must be shut out from their un- 

 derstandings. 



It is now twenty-six years since the friends of agricultural improve- 

 ment first made a serious effort to establish an agricultural college in 

 this State. Your committee have before them an essay published in 

 this city, in 1819, of forty-two pages, advocating such an institution 

 with unanswerable arguments. 



At a later period the lamented Judge Buel succeeded in procuring 

 a naked charter for such a school ; but not a single dollar could be 

 obtained to aid private enterprise in teaching the unerring laws of 

 nature to the young men who are to pursue the modern art of trans- 

 forming solid rocks into fertile soils, and these again into human food 

 and raiment. 



Wise legislators conferred unlimited authority on a few Canal Com- 

 missioners to expend indefinite millions in cutting and beautifying in- 

 animate stone along the line of the enlarged canal ; but the law mak- 

 ing power refused to grant one dollar to teach the science of rural 

 economy to the sons and daughters of practical farmers. Within the 

 last twenty-six years there has been taken from the public treasury 

 about $200,000 to prepare the candidates f(U" legal honors to study 

 successfully the science of law. We have also four well endowed 

 medical colleges, now drawing from the public funds $5,500 a year, 

 besides $200,000 before received. 



We have so long paid a large bounty on all branches of unproduc- 

 tive industry that no young man, of any honorable ambition, will 

 consent to toil, and sweat, and burn in the sun on a farm, for $10 a 

 month, when as a clerk in a store, a bank, a broker's office, or as the 

 student in a doctor's or lawyer's office, he can expect, in the course of 

 twenty years, to command five dollars to one, and at one-fifth of the 



