282 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



worse condition than we received them from the hands of the 

 savager 



If we have gone too far in our educational policy in any one 

 direction, we must change, that's all. "We need farm schools, 

 now, to rectify our common schools and teach boys and girls to 

 use their hands in the interest of mechanical as well as agricultural 

 art. Some of our teachers need to be taught how a denial of 

 faith in the earth restricts knowledge and experience of it, and 

 saps the foundations of common honesty and religion. 



Faiil^ in the ground is the tap-root of human society and the 

 main stay of the State amidst the crazy mercantile panics that 

 every little while sweep over the land. But faith in the soil is 

 often lost or dislocated. The crafty speculation in <' futures," that 

 degrades our manhood, grew naturally out of the priestly specula- 

 tion in futures that oppressed our boyhood. We shall always ' 

 require schools of agriculture, to be just and true, as the righteous 

 foundation for other schools and the health of society. It was the 

 devil, you know, who declared to our first parents that they should 

 not surely die by false knowledge. Every dishonesty of this day 

 finds a precedent in dishonest treatment of the land in former 

 days. 



The readiest people to admit that a farmer needs to be a close 

 and logical thinker are often those who know little or nothing, 

 practically, about his business. They have learned how accuracy 

 is needful for every business. Some who were born on a farm 

 and spent their early years in the old routine farm employments 

 often fail to understand its recent developments and disabilities, 

 because they never knew them. They judge the farm by what it 

 was in their boyhood. They left it while their mental caliber was 

 unfit to hold the best spirit of the old culture and before there was 

 any chance to catch the newer inspirations. These early gradu- 

 ates may have carried away from the farm physical and mental 

 strength to apply profitably in other affairs but they can never 

 know to a certainty whether the same applicatioti of industry and 

 talent would not have brought a higher reward and a more last- 

 ing good fortune from the soil, because they never gave their 

 mature powers and energies to it. Merely having been born on a 

 farm does not ensure the farming faculty any more than birth in a 

 stable ensures a good milch cow. Some of our most noted farmers 

 employed their early years in something else, and trained their 



