MAINE STATE SOCIETY. 55 



pursued in the true light of science, as God opened the way for its 

 pursuit, will stand in need of no protection but that Divine protec- . 

 tion promised from the beginning of the world. 



We would be understood, then, to assert that the farmers, more 

 than any other class of men, stand in need of education. Not that 

 they need a particle more of it than other men, or classes of men ; 

 but that having now less of it, in proportion to their natural wants, 

 they have greater need that the school-master should go among 

 them. 



Here, we have occasion to inquire what is the education to which 

 we refer ? Shall the farmer be put to the study of the dead lan- 

 guages ? Shall he be set to read Horace, and Virgil, and Cicero, 

 and a multitude of classic authors he never heard of,, in Greek, and 

 Latin, and Hebrew ? Just as soon would we advise him to feed his 

 milch cows on rye-straw; which, though it might be better than to 

 let them stand shivering in idleness on the north side of the barn, 

 would be a bad arrangement for the milk-pail, or the fatting calf. 

 If the farmer could study nothing elsa^ we would set him to search- 

 ing out the mysteries of heathen mythology through the musty 

 channel of Greek and Latin; at least sooner than to see him driven to 

 the too common resort of "whistling as he goes for want of thought." 

 Just so we would set the idle boy to hunting for white mice, sooner 

 than see the devil employ him about something worse. The farmer 

 is emphatically a utilitarian ; and we would lead him in this bis 

 natural channel to his heart's content. We would educate him in 

 nothing that does not directly touch his purse-strings or his heart- 

 strings. He should by no means become a scholar, in the popular 

 meaning of the term ; but an educated farmer — educated expressly * 

 for the farm, and in the science and mastery of farming. And while 

 we should thus make him an educated farmer, we should find we 

 had also made him an educated man — educated not precisely like 

 all other men, but to mingle with and act his pirt among all other 

 classes of men. We would educate him in chemistry, not to enable 

 him to detect the presence of prussic acid in the human stomach ; 

 or to separate iron from blood, or sugar from paper-rags. All these 

 things might indeed result, but they would not be the object aimed 

 at. He should study it in its relation to the analysis of soils, and 

 to everything else in any way associated with the nourishment of 



