292 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. ' [Jan., 



ers to the good teachers of the past, and as you widen out, and 

 increase the chances of study not only on the farm, but in the 

 agricuhural college and in the plain little schools on the 

 hillsides, make sure to add something of the nature which 

 you love to work with. And as you do it, may you encourage 

 yourselves by remembering that you are doing it not 

 simply for the sake of those who will come after you 

 and own your farms, but because these boys and girls 

 of yours, at your age, will be, the majority of them, in 

 the whirl and stress and temptation of the city streets, and 

 some of them thousands of miles from the quiet and simple 

 sweet life into which they were born. They will be there, 

 ladies and gentlemen. The responsibility is yours to train 

 your sons to stand a stress and strain of life that will l)e 

 very hard to bear. Some of them will have to face harder 

 problems, and they are hard enough now, God knows, in the 

 tenement houses of our cities, but they will be harder twenty 

 years hence. The world that we live in is getting vastly 

 complicated, and it is going to be harder for your grand- 

 children than for your children to face and settle rightly the 

 complicated problems which will be theirs. Not only will 

 they have to rule our own happy land, complicated and hard 

 as its home problems are and will be, but they will have to 

 rule a land ten thousand miles away, and all the problems of 

 the future of our new possessions will be theirs for solution. 

 You will feel as you give these sources of happiness and 

 strength and power to your boys and girls, and opened their 

 minds to influences which can never be lost upon them in the 

 stress and strain which will come upon them in the days 

 of the future, and they will feel, that you builded better 

 than you knew when you taxed yourselves heavily, and 

 studied patiently that all these sources of happiness and 

 strength might come to them, your children, who shall rule 

 our cities, and the cities of the islands of the sea ten, twenty, 

 and thirty years hence. 



I asked one of the ablest young lawyers of thirty-five I 

 knew what was the best, a city or a country training and experi- 

 ence, and what was the best thing that nature ever gave him? 

 And he said, " Nature always gave me this great thing: it 

 gave me observation." He had just won a great case, but he 

 said to me: " I did not think my case was much better than the 

 other side, but as a farmer's boy I learned to see things, and 



