194 BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



morals and of patriotism. An eminent authority has said: "The 

 strength of the great armies of the world has never been made 

 up of the inhabitants of large cities; in fact, except in a few rare 

 instances, city people will not even defend their own homes when 

 besieged by hostile forces; with them selfishness becomes stronger 

 than patriotism." 



And this opens up a new line of country education. It is here 

 that patriotism is strongest, because a country home is so much 

 more than a city house, and there is more loving self-sacrifice in 

 the family relations. When we hear of some wealthy man doing 

 great deeds of charity and benevolence we may assume that he is 

 country bred. When we hear of a Cornell funding an university, • 

 or a Sheffield endowing a great school, we almost know that their 

 boyhood must have been spent in the country. City-bred men 

 rarely do such things. The immense sums contributed to charity, 

 to the forming and endowment^ of schools and colleges, to the 

 cause of missions, and the spread of Christianity and civilization, 

 has been because so large a proportion of our population has 

 had some farm education, and because our farmers have not been 

 peasants. 



This last item is a most important one in this connection. We 

 have no peasant class to till the land, at least in the northern 

 States. What "might have been," had a peasant class been 

 established in the colonies,- we can imagine from the condition 

 of Mexico, where the peasant system of the old world was intro- 

 duced, and where, consequently, we find the middle ages still 

 perpetuated on the farms, middle-age tools, and middle-age intel- 

 ligence. Because of this, too, our republic is politically what 

 it is. We were not the only people who established a republic in 

 the last part of the last century, France started one about the 

 same time that we got our new constitution in running order. We 

 know that it was a miserable failure. This is usually attributed to 

 being founded on an unsound religions basis; but it was, too, on an 

 unsound land and agricultural basis. The people must be fed 

 from the soil, and the tillers of the soil of France were peasants at 

 the bottom of the social scale, and at the bottom of the intellectual 

 life of the people. No wonder the republic failed there. I am dis- 

 cussing the educational influences of the American farm, under 

 the American farmer, not that of other lands where the fields are 

 tilled by a socially inferior class. The relation of this to the 



