2± MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



five years, when a generation of educated people shall occupy 

 that island, there will be a return from agriculture, manufac- 

 tures, commerce and the mines, sufficient for the comfortable 

 support of twelve or fifteen million of people. 



This is the fruit of universal education in a country benighted 

 and degraded in all the historical centuries of its existence. 



It may be proper also to suggest two tilings to those of you 

 who are heads of families and farmers of experience. First, . 

 when you have a hundred dollars, and your debts are all paid, 

 do not purchase stocks, nor lend it to some friend who, as you 

 think, may make a better use of the money than you can, but 

 rather invest it in trees, or fences, or farm buildings, or under- 

 draining, or manures. Put it somewhere, so that under your 

 own eye, and without the risk of loss, it shall yield an 

 income, but whether four or six, or ten per cent., is quite 

 immaterial. In this way you secure safety and also the cer- 

 tainty of some adequate return. Secondly, if you have a boy 

 of promise, a boy of whom you have hopes, educate him in 

 the idea that he is to take a farm ; that it is an honorable 

 department of business ; give him a chance to do something in 

 the world, and do not hold him to the dismal doctrine that 

 every thing must be done after the fashion that you followed or 

 set. Uclieve in progress in agriculture, and, consequently, 

 tolerate efforts to do things in new and possibly better ways. 



Farmers cannot afford to be rash or inconsiderate in the 

 adoption of new processes and theories ; but it is their faulty 

 oftentimes bordering dangerously on criminality, that they 

 resist all innovations and hold their sons and successors to a 

 disagreeable and unprofitable allegiance to old and out-worn 

 practices. 



Educate your families, daughters as well as sons, in the idea 

 that farming is respectable. It too often happens that our sons 

 and daughters look upon the farmer's life as a life of drudgery, 

 and they willingly resign it for whatever else is offered. The 

 result is attributable, in part, to the fact that the agriculturists 

 have resisted the refining influences of modern civilization. As 

 far as this civilization has taught the incompatibility of labor with 

 intellectual and moral refinement, they have done well to resist 

 its introduction. Yet the refining and elevating education of 

 society ought not to be resisted, nor ought its inilucnce to be 



