272 • BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



failures, and it is sometimes because of something tliey can*t find out. 

 Women get discouraged, and tliey tlaink it is not at all worth while to 

 undertake a special education. A few years ago I was at a great pottery 

 in France, and saw in there a young Frenchman who was sitting at a 

 bench working a treadle with his foot. He had taken a small bit of that 

 beautiful white clay and fashioned it for our entertainment. He did it so 

 easily and so successfully and so skillfully that I felt I could do the very 

 same thing. That bit of plastic clay he would draw out into a beautiful 

 high, graceful vase, and then make a glol)ular shape in perfect taste; 

 presently he made a cup, beautiful, thin, delicate as an egg shell, and yet 

 he handled it with perfect ease. He handed it to a girl of our party, and 

 she, without thinking, reached out her gloved hand, and she had scarcely 

 touched that cup until it fell in fragments at our feet. The man looked at 

 her in a knowing way, as if to say: "You have not skill enough to hold 

 the beautiful thing I have created." Now that girl could have been taught 

 to hold that cup; she could have been taught to hold it just as easily as the 

 man who fashioned it. So it is with this beautiful, delicate thing we call 

 home, made up of housekeeping and home making. 



We see so many shattered homes, so many homes that have been un- 

 dertaken in youthful enthusiasm, whex-e the girl had not been trained for 

 it, and the home was shattered; but that girl could have been taught, 

 could have been trained; her mind could have been trained. 



Of course, there have been most beautiful homes in the past, most 

 magnificent, in which fine men and fine women have been nurtured, and 

 those homes have been organized and managed by those who have liad no 

 special training. Such homes are and have been made; but the women 

 in those homes correspond with those men who, Avithout any advantage in 

 youth, have earned their own way, sent themselves to school, and by their 

 own efforts, energy, ability, genius, have reached congress— circumstances 

 under which we call them "self-made men." Some of the finest men we 

 have ever had in the United States have l)een what we call self-made men 

 — men without education Avhen they started, unable to read and write, 

 perhaps; but who would venture to start his boy today, without giving him 

 some opportunity to learn to read and write. The opportunities offered 

 are so much wider to the one who has some culture, some training. So 

 almost every home might be successfully organized and maintained if 

 the one who makes the home has some special training. 



I think of tliis kind of training in connection with agricultural train- 

 ing, education. You Ivuow it has not been very long ago since people 

 smiled when the agricultural college was referred to. There were those 

 who thought we needed no special education for agriculture. It is a 

 proposition that can not be denied, that if agriculture is a business that 

 calls for a first-class brain, this l)rain must be trained and educated, 

 drawn out and developed; if agriculture is a business that can be done by 

 third, fourth or fifth grade of men, then education, perhaps, is not neces- 



