282 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



Commonwealth, we shall teach them to read and write, and a 

 good deal else beside. We shall teach them in a language 

 which you do not understand, teach them in English, which 

 none of you can speak or understand, and which most of you 

 will never learn to understand, and until your children are 

 fourteen they shall study thirty weeks in the year. Whether 

 you need their wages or not you cannot have them to work. 

 The factory will help us, the truant officers will help us, and 

 your children must learn these things of which you never 

 heard." Ladies and gentlemen of New England, have you 

 thought what an awful thing that is to do? What a crime 

 that is unless before you let these little children slip out of your 

 hands their public school days have not been made to do 

 better for them than their parents would have ever known 

 how to do? That having said, " you shall learn," we have 

 taught them what to read, and how to read, and that having 

 said to them, " you shall learn to write," we have taught them 

 to write in a language which their parents cannot read, and 

 having taught them what it is wise to read as well as what it 

 is wholesome to read, and having taught them so much of 

 many books, and this language which their parents cannot 

 read with them, we have put such ideals of citizenship, and 

 of manhood and womanhood, and dreams of ambition into 

 these little girls and boys which not only makes it safe in 

 Connecticut and Massachusetts for them to have a majority 

 of our votes fifteen or twenty years hence, but to be the 

 majority of the mothers in our homes twenty or thirty years 

 hence. If we do that we have not only made it safe to trust 

 our political future in their hands, but we have done much to 

 make them happy and good, and good for them to have been 

 taken on the dock and put into our pubHc school system, and 

 given the education which Connecticut and Massachusetts are 

 so proud to have given to their own sons and daughters 

 through all the happy past, and which is now a part of our 

 history and our inheritance. And so I think you will agree 

 with me, an old teacher, that it is wise that we citizens, we 

 men and women, should control this whole question, and that 

 in these districts and towns and cities we should do our best 

 for these little children in our hands, and isn't it wise 

 that we should ask ourselves " what are the best forces we 

 can give them in the few years that we have them in our 



