ADDRESS OF DR. BOYNTON. 395 



able for the harvests of this year, or next year, or the year after 

 that ; but one thing we may be certain of, that investments made 

 in this way are sure to pay in the future ; they are sure to pay to 

 you personally, sure to pay in your communities, and in fourfold 

 measure, ay, a hundred fold, are they sure to pay you as a State. 

 The maturing and perfecting of this kind of education, which 

 shall go out into our masses, will be one of the ways in which the 

 question shall be answered which was brought up for your con- 

 sideration last evening, and which was so well carried out by the 

 admirable lecture to which we listened this forenoon ; one of the 

 ways in which the question shall be answered, " How shall we 

 sustain a multiplying population, a population year by year grow- 

 ing more dense upon our soil, while out of this soil, from which 

 we already draw our sustenance, a continual drain is going on, 

 every year, into the sea ?" It will be by the elevation of this 

 class of labor into an intelligent position, so that in any given 

 cix'cumstances we can secure the highest available results out of 

 any condition whatever which may hereafter overtake us. It is not 

 an idle dream, nor a Utopian theory to talk of, or to hope for, this 

 idea of intelligent labor which we hope to have in the community. 

 I hope to live to see a day of great advancement myself, when 

 through its agency we shall make a better use of the earth than 

 the best of us make now. With all our advantages, with all our 

 perfection of machinery, with all our skill and intelligence in agri- 

 cultural pursuits, we have not yet begun to ascertain what one 

 acre of the soil of this earth will give us in return for skillful and 

 intelligent labor. I believe firmly in the truth of all God's laws, 

 and of God's laws applied everywhere ; and I believe that beauti- 

 ful promise of the Gospel, " Ask and it shall be given unto you, 

 good measure, pressed down and running over, shall the earth" 

 (to substitute a word) "give unto your bosoms." You will find 

 it true here, when you feed the earth with what it needs, as we 

 were told this forenoon ; and when, in addition to that, in the 

 application of that food, and in taking from the earth the products 

 thereof, you apply a skilled labor, you will find the one will in- 

 crease in manifold degree and perfection the fruitfulness and final 

 result of the other. 



How miserably, how shamefully, how cruelly, the best of us treat 

 this kind ol(^ mother Earth, after all ! With what rudeness we 

 scratch over her fair fields, with what greedy clutches, with what 

 avaricious grasp we tear off the leafy garlands that she hangs over 



