Education of the 3Tarmee. 447 



to begin work on the farm. His class-rooms, his teachers, and his 

 resources would be utterly inadequate to meet such a demand. 

 There are about 250,000 farms in your State. In order to place 

 a college graduate on each one it would be necessary for your 

 State college to send out 5,000 men yearly for the next fifty years 

 — a result too improbable to be mentioned seriously. I venture 

 the assertion that no land grant college exists in this country that 

 has sent out an average of one agricultural graduate for each 

 township in its State. 



There are other reasons beside the limitations of space and 

 means why not only young men who expect to be farmers do not 

 seek the agricultural college, but especially why many New Eng- 

 land farm-bred boys turn to some other than their father's calling, 

 reasons that are not a just cause of reproach to the boys or the 

 farm or the college. Permit me to state some of these in words 

 used on a former occasion : 



Those on the one hand who jeer at the college because it has 

 no more agricultural students and on the other hand who reproach 

 farmers and their families because so many country lads seek 

 some other life work than agriculture, are either consumed in their 

 reason by sentiment or prejudice or are shallow in their analysis 

 of the situation. 



Our land-grant colleges have accomplished a grand work for 

 agriculture and our rural people by educating leaders, disseminat- 

 ing information and promoting investigation. They have directly 

 and indirectly brought into existence a new literature for the 

 fanner and have aided powerfully in creating confidence in science 

 as a utility. It is time, nevertheless, openly and frankly to 

 acknowledge the fact that notwithstanding their great usefulness 

 these institutions will be the direct means of educating only h 

 small minority of the farmers of any State. 



But what about the great majority ? Three facts claim our at 

 tention in this connection: (1) The farmer sustains intimate and 

 practical relations with the laws and forces of the material world ; 

 (2) We are in possession of a fund of knowledge concerning these 

 laws and forces, very incomplete to be sure, but sufficiently definite 

 and extensive to be useful, and (3) much the larger part of the 

 young men who become farmers are to all intents and purposes 

 ignorant of even the simplest principles of what we speak of as 

 agricultural science. This situation is persistently and insistently 

 coming up before us for consideration and the question which 

 presses for answer and which should lie heavily on the conscience 



