1902.] DISCUSSION. 85 



The Secretary. Gentlemen, on our program there is 

 a topic suggested that comes in very prettily with this dis- 

 cussion. " Can the Farmers' Institute be Made a Feature 

 of the Agricultural Fair ? " Our agricultural fairs are not 

 what they were within the memory of the majority of this 

 audience. They do not inspire the interest they did twenty- 

 five years ago. Can the farmers' institute be engrafted upon 

 the agricultural fair so as to make an agricultural fair an 

 educational institution? That is the object of this question, 

 and no doubt there are gentlemen in this audience who can 

 give us points on that which will be well worth listening to. 



A Member. I think that the agricultural fair, the old- 

 time agricultural fair, as a means of advancing the cause of 

 agriculture, has had its day long past; that the work that 

 this Board of Agriculture took up in its early days, broad- 

 ened out throughout this State, and it has been further ex- 

 tendered by the dairymen's association, by the grange, and by 

 the experiment station, and by various works of that kind, 

 and it is doing more and better work for agriculture than the 

 old-time fairs ever did. All of these elements are contribut- 

 ing to do a much higher grade of work and much better work. 

 I cannot see in my own mind how there is to be any agri- 

 cultural fair in the future that is going to be of any great 

 advantage to the interest of agriculture. It seems to me 

 that it would be an impractical thing to attempt to tie up the 

 institute with it. When people go to a fair, as they go now- 

 adays, they go for fun. That is about the only purpose now. 

 If you are going to an agricultural fair you do not think now 

 of going to do serious educational work, as you do when 

 you go to an institute. I think what money is appropriated 

 in our State at the present time to go to the so-called agri- 

 cultural fairs is money pretty fairly wasted. Fifty per cent. 

 of it would do more good if spent on some carefully-systema- 

 tized plan of holding institutes than the whole of it as now 

 expended. 



