14 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



It is true that the law requires schools to be kept in towns con 

 tabling five hundred families, in which Greek and Latin can be 

 taught. But it by no means requires that all the scholars who 

 attend these schools shall study them. And it is hardly just 

 to ruin the practical education of nine-tenths of the scholars, 

 for the sake of fitting one boy or ten for college. The educa- 

 tion of the scholars in our public schools should be such as to 

 make intelligent men and women in the great industrial depart- 

 ments of life. Farmers . and mechanics, look to it that your 

 schools do this work for which they were established ; then 

 agriculture and mechanics will be arts, not drudgeries. 



The reason why labor is repulsive, and considered a curse, is 

 because it is blindly directed, unintelligent. The attainment 

 of food or money is the only motive to work. Appetite or 

 avarice goad men to the field or the shop ; the palate is the 

 lash, and the purse the garner. They do not go because they 

 delight in the art of tilling the soil and constructing the machine, 

 as the artist goes to his studio and makes the landscape glow 

 on his canvas, or the bosom warm in his statue. But the farmer 

 and mechanic should so work, and would so work, if they under- 

 stood the philosophy of their profession, the chemistry of their 

 art. They would go to their fields and shops as boys go to a 

 holiday. 



I am not saying that work is not work. Play is work, and 

 the hardest of work. And all work should be so saturated with 

 intelligence and interest, as well as with sweat, as to make it a 

 luxury. 



Another reason why agricultural life is not made attractive 

 and a delight, is that too much soil, as well as too little soul is 

 employed. Quantity instead of quality of soil is regarded. 

 Muscle and not mind is put into the work. Large fields are 

 tormented amidst much sweat and fretting, to yield a poor crop 

 of poor grain; small fields arc not tilled with little sweat and 

 many smiles to produce abundant and excellent harvests 



Science and labor well applied, will, I suppose, double the 

 quantity of the crop on most acres now tilled in this county, 

 and bring twice as many into tillage as are now occupied. We 

 have run mad as individuals and as a nation with a rage for 

 more territory. The time is not distant when it will not require 

 half a township to keep a good dairy of cows. What is wanted 



