LECTURES AND ESSAYS READ AT INSTITUTES. 413: 



power nor ability to cram, proficiency, the fanner who contentedly tills his 

 fields by the sweat of his brow, letting what lies back of the brow go fallow, 

 will, not get on. There must be good brain as well as good muscle. The 

 times are teeming witli new ideas, and the farmer must be bounced out of the 

 ruts and strike his head against some of these new notions. There is nothing 

 in algebra, or botany, or chemistry, or philosophy, or literature, to unfit a boy 

 for the farm ; but, during the boy's school life, there is much in the spirit 

 inculcated at home by parents, and at school by teachers and visitors, to create 

 discontent and excite insubordination. Ambitious selections are collected for 

 reading books; ambitious declamations are spouted. Old fools — played-out 

 pedagogues and fogy parsons — visit the schools, and always ''make some 

 remarks." They tell the boys to *'aim high," to ''shoot at the sun," to 

 "hitch their wagon to a star," to "look way up, and may be they'll catch a 

 school ma'am." 



They quote Longfellow's 



" Lives of great men all remind us 

 We can make our lives sublime," 



which is very musical and very false. A few great men have made their 

 memories sublime; but we can't all do it; for the offices of life are mainly 

 humble, requiring humble powers, and giving but humble rewards. The 

 backwoodsman, the tailor, the canal driver who have become presidents ; the 

 fur trader who became a mighty millionaire (and a mighty mean one); the 

 country school-master, who became a prince among merchants; the few, who 

 by enterprise, self-assertion, self-culture, have raised themselves from obscur- 

 ity to place and power, — these the school-master and antiquated visitor keep- 

 before boys as shining examples. They tell a little truth and a good deal of 

 falsehood to rouse unlettered ambition. They stimulate the boys not to rise 

 in their own sphere, but to rise in the world irrespective of ability, tastes, or 

 chances of success and usefulness. Barefaced lies]are written in copy books ; 

 "Where there's a will, there's a way," as if Sammy Tilden's will could make 

 him President, or Jay Hubbell's could have sent him back to Congress, 

 political assessments and all; "Labor conquers all things," as if the veriest 

 blockhead could write Shakespeare's plays, manipulate Vanderbilt's railroads, 

 or draw Kemenyi's fiddle bow by main strength. To become great lawyers, 

 doctors, ministers, scholars, statesmen, capitalists (they are never told they may 

 become great farmers), boys need only to labor, and will irrespective of 

 natural adaptation or the demand for such men. Under spurs like these, the 

 deluded victims of false ideas rush away from the farms to the towns 



" Where bang, whan^, whang, goes the drum, 

 And tootle de tootle the fife," 



and the densest crowd marching in time follows the music. 



Said George William Curtis in a recent oration: "Take from the country 

 at this moment the educated power which is contemned as romantic and sen- 

 timental, and you would take from the army its geueral, from the ship its 

 compass, from national action its moral mainspring. It is not the dema- 

 gogue and the shouting rabble, it is the people heeding the word of the thinker 

 and the lesson of experience, which secures the welfare of the American 

 Eepublic and enlarges human liberty. If American scholarship does not carry 

 the election to-day, it determines the policy of to-morrow." 



If such is the leadership of educated thought in civil affairs, can it be less 

 on the condition of the husbandman and the progress of agriculture? But our 



