426 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



But ia a country like ours, where labor wields tlie rights of wisdom and fur- 

 nishes the power for support of our institutions, such a policy is not safe, if it 

 were humane. The very interests of education itself depend upon the sup- 

 port it gains from men of culture in every calling. Our schools must meet 

 the wants of a whole generation, or they M'ill cease to exist. Moreover, the 

 growing spirit of defiance for the authority of history or philosophy can be 

 provided against only through training up a generation with the intelligence 

 and the experience together that shall give a wise .solution for vexed questions 

 in social and political science out of the very heart of labor itself. 



All that possible development of taste and judgnient, too, that must be 

 depended i;pon to make these arts, not merely more i)roductive, but more 

 richly productive, so as to extend our wares to meet the wants of all the eartii, 

 is to be lost sight of in such a policy. If the artizan is to be always uncul- 

 tivated because he is a workman; if the farmer must be a "clodhopper" 

 because he holds the plow, our boasted progress is backward, and we had 

 better retrace our steps to the good old times of Cincinnatus, the ploughman 

 and statesman together. But we know that this need not be, and believe that 

 a reasonable degree of strength can come to both muscles and brain, if train- 

 ing and cultnre are rightly adjusted. 



Shall we, then, go to the other extreme, and subordinate all to the trade, 

 overcoming the natural opposition between the widening views of science and 

 the narrow routine of a trade by cutting the science to fit the trade? Shall 

 the effort be simply to add a sort of mental dexterity to a physical one in a 

 single line of work? With such intent, we shall say to a youth of twelve or 

 fifteen, "We'll make a mechanic of you, and for this purpose we'll dose out 

 with your daily routine of apprenticeship such facts as you will be likely to 

 use most. Mathematics, beyond the prime rules of arithmetic, is not so useful 

 as many facts in a table of strength of materials; but we'll take the prac- 

 tical part of mechanical philosophy, with chemistry enough to instruct you 

 in the nature of the elements you handle. The rest shall come from the 

 history and illustrations of your trade." For the farmer the course would bo 

 varied slightly by giving even less of mathematics and cliemistry, but intro- 

 ducing short courses in botany and mineralogy with abundance of technical 

 facts and rules in agriculture and horticulture. 



All this assumes that information is education; but is it so? You mav fill 

 the memory with facts of any kind and so long as you do not train your 

 thinking powers to wider observation and more accurate judgment, you grow 

 only the more arrogant and narrow-minded. Such a training, if practicable, 

 makes men as nearly perfect machines as voluntary human souls can bo. Its 

 legitimate results would be to make even more narrow tiian it now is the 

 routine of a workman's life. Extreme division of labor in the arts already 

 weakens body and mind and will, and crowds into cliques and chisses. 

 The only check as yet found to operate against this tendency is a foundation 

 of general knowledge, revealiug such a unity of truth as draws one away at 

 times from his own narrow rjceds. When, as one of the wise men has it, all 

 the farmer's "talk is of bullocks" and "he giveth his mind to make fur- 

 rows," do you not expect that however "wise in his own work" he may be, 

 "all his desire is in the work of his craft," and realize his inability to "sit on 

 the judge's seat or understand the sentence of judgment ?" If tliis is true of 

 one who binds himself down to the details of farming, in which there is such 

 diversity of employment, such a variety of calls for ingenuity and judgment, 

 how much more true is it in any of the more restricted arts and trades. Instead 



