AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 33 



and Lisle and Home, of Cobbett, and Arthur Young — could the 

 literature of England be deprived of this, and not lose one of its 

 chiefest charms, one of its national characteristics ? Read 

 the accounts of progressive agriculture in Scotland, Holland, 

 France ; read the miraculous success in subduing the hardest 

 soils recorded in Talpa ; read the ingenious operations of Mechi, 

 and tell me if the Arabian Nights or the Happy Valley can 

 carry the mind into sweeter regions. Follow our own Colman 

 in his enthusiastic researches, and you may live in all the fresh- 

 ness of glowing country. Take if you will the text-book of the 

 very foundation of all good farming, French on drainage, and 

 the swamps and morasses and clay-beds of New England become 

 to your mind as full of vegetable beauty as are teeming savan- 

 nahs. Let your eye wander over the last State Report on 

 Agriculture, lying on your table, and, before you are aware of 

 it, you are introduced by your industrious and accomplished 

 Secretary to the rural homes of a happy people, whose hills and 

 valleys are alive with growing crops and with flocks and herds. 

 And when you have faithfully toiled through the last leader 

 of your favorite editor upon " the great doctrine of popular 

 sovereignty," or upon our foreign relations, or " have supped 

 full of horrors " upon murders and robberies, or have been 

 lashed into indignation at some newspaper abuse of your best 

 friend, lay this all aside, and take up your last agricultural 

 journal — do you not feel at once with an indescribable satisfac- 

 tion, that you " have kept the good wine until now?" It is 

 indeed so. All men read the literature of agriculture with 

 peculiar zest, and dream of farms, and are soothed and com- 

 forted with the hope of one day being farmers. And this 

 literature is your prerogative, the text of your profession, the 

 soul and spirit of your business, the thought which is freely 

 offered you, and which will make you better farmers, happier 

 men, if you will but learn to love it in your youth, and to 

 cherish and cling to it in your old age. 



Those of us who are engaged in farming should moreover 

 bear in mind, that through mental cultivation have we arrived 

 at our modern improvements in agriculture. One of the great 

 necessities of the times is the economy of labor in the produc- 

 tion of all articles of general use. In England and in our own 

 country the laboring classes generally possess a due share of the 



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