MAINE STATE SOCIETY. 51 



ESSAY. 



BY JAMES OLCOTT BROWN, OF PORTLAND. 



■" On the Intellectual Wants of Farmers, and the most Practicable Mode of sup- 

 plying those Waftts." 



Happily the old sentiment, that there must necessarily be an 

 antagonism between the life and disposition of an educated man, 

 and the life and disposition of a common farmer", is fast losing 

 the ground it once so tenaciously held in the minds of a large 

 class of persons. The youngest man of to-day may easily re- 

 member the time when farmers looked with latent suspicion, if 

 not downright animadversion on any attempt to institute a new 

 order of things. The way their fathers plowed and planted 

 and reaped, was to them a surer criterion of success than the 

 soundest deductions of an experimental science. To abandon 

 the " faith of those fathers" was an act of heresy quite too un- 

 warranted and startling, to require any sympathy from them. 

 Hence we find, as we always may under similar attendant cir- 

 cumstances, that no positive improvements were either matured, 

 or even indeed inaugurated in agricultural economy. The pro- 

 gressive tendencies however, of our republican institutions, the 

 prominence and position of the educated man, and the depend- 

 ency of the State upon the individual, have done much to displace 

 the foolish prejudices ever prevalent among farmers and to 

 foster, at the same time that it arouses, "an emulous zeal for a 

 higher and nobler order of culture. What that is, science and 

 history are fast demonstrating. 



It was an old time idea, far too much in vogue, that the 

 smartest sons of a country family should be sent away to enjoy 

 the advantages of a liberal education and a professional life, 

 whilst the less nobly endowed child should be kept at home to 

 till the paternal acres in the unvarying routine of a prescribed 

 system. But the farmer of the present day is ill fitted to suc- 

 ceed, nay, is ill deserving of success, who is not well informed 



