FARMERS NEED A HIGHER EDUCATION. 51 



work, and so keep on in the " good old way," as you call it, 

 with your crops growing 



" Small by degrees and beautifully less ? " 



Or will you rather endeavor to learn whether your own 

 want of knowledge in the premises, may not have caused you 

 to plant your seed in an uncongenial soil, lacking the very 

 element necessary to your crop, and that therefore you have 

 failed to reap where you have sown ? So let me urge upon 

 you with special earnestness, that while you cultivate your 

 farms and bring to bear upon them every appliance that can 

 invigorate them and so increase their productiveness, — making 

 two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before, — 

 making two golden apples to blush on the branch where but 

 one before did glitter in the sunbeam, — that doing so much 

 for soil and fruit, you should not omit to do something 

 towards enriching your own intellect, making two useful 

 thoughts to spring where but one sprung before; something 

 towards the cultivation of your moral natures, making two 

 useful acts to quicken into their blessed work where but one 

 had blessed before. Your own interest itself is promoted by 

 perseverance in such culture, and the wiser you become in 

 all proper and useful wisdom, the better and more abundant 

 will be the results you shall secure from every acre you may 

 till, the richer the harvest that shall ripen from the seed you 

 shall have sown, and the nurture you shall have given it. 



The agricultural people of our Commonwealth, have, in all 

 time of its existence, done great and good things for the 

 State, and the State hath requited by doing great and good 

 things for them and for their children, and she has a further 

 right which must not be ignored, to require yet other and 

 greater and better things. And to be able to meet her just 

 requirements, her farmers must be well educated — educated 

 in the noblest interpretation of education. I do not mean to 

 say that they are not, in the general way, an educated people. 

 That is conceded ; but they must be still further educated, and 

 educated up to the highest demands of the art they practice, — 

 educated that they may bring forth better or greater results 

 by the application of more enlarged minds, and of the power 



