STATE AID TO AGRICULTURE. 11 



the power to turn experience and observation into practical use — 

 these are vast themes for the farmers' attention, mastered only in a 

 life-time. Farmers should have a knowledge of all that immediate- 

 ly concerns their callins:. They should understand how to srow 

 large crops, and how to dispose of the same as to the best time and 

 advantage. This is education ; to learn to think and make the most 

 of life, to become live farmers, and the live thinkers whether having 

 acorn-field or governing a nation always lead. Then, fellow men, 

 ignorance is the only slave ; God ever made intelligence the only 

 king. 



The new customs and fashions of the people engaged in other in- 

 dustries demand that agricultural products shall be of a higher type 

 and better qualit}'. It is almost an impossibility to dispose of an 

 inferior article of farm productions. The cry is more gilt-edge but- 

 ter, better beef, potatoes, fruits and whiter flour. Yet in this, as in 

 many things, education lags far behind conception, and supply re- 

 sponds slowly to demand. To some extent this is true in the appli- 

 cation of this element of education of a2:riculture. If I should ask 

 the question here to-day. Is agricultural education necessary ? every 

 one present would answer. Yes. If I should ask the men who be- 

 lieve that the profession of agriculture exempts from the conditions 

 of skill and science required for success in other pursuits, to stand 

 up, all would remain seated. Educational fitness for this is, as 

 for all pursuits of life, theoretically admitted. The time de- 

 mands that in whatever profession man is engaged he should be 

 educated to that profession. Now, who will tell me that it is less 

 important for the farmer to uiMerstand the composition of his soil 

 that produces a certain vegetable or grain, than it is for the painter 

 to know how to combine colors, so as to produce one unlike either of 

 its constituents and more desirable than all of them separated? 



Who will tell me that it is more unfortunate for the farmer to neg- 

 lect through ignorance the vital condition to the perfection of a crop 

 from the soil, than for a lawyer to try a case and send it to the jury 

 in ignorance of the repeal of the statutes upon which the claim of 

 his client rests ? Will any one tell me how the farmer can overcome 

 or guard against the multitude of diseases that assail vegetable life, 

 without a knowledge of the principle of growth and condition of 

 health in tree and plant, better than the ph3'sician can treat corre- 

 sponding derangements in the human system, without the knowledge 

 of physiology and the cause and nature of diseases? 

 2 



