410 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE 



1^0 the farmer is not to be blamed for his lack of knowledge of the 

 benelits of an agi-icultural college course. We must have patience with 

 him. He will grow to this knowledge, or if not his successors of the 

 coming generation will, and the college will be crowded with students 

 and will be asking the State for increased appropriations in order to 

 provide buildings to hold them. 



Let not the advocates of the Agricultural College be discouraged. Its 

 day is coming, just as the day of the technical mechanical engineering 

 college has already come. It is just 20 years ago that I graduated from 

 a mechanical engineering college in the east. There were then probably 

 not over 50 graduates of such colleges in the country, and they were a 

 drug in the market. It was panic times then, but the workshops of the 

 <;ountry did not then appreciate the graduates, and thafew that obtained 

 work in these shops had to go in at the very bottom as apprentices. 

 Now the conditions are entirely different; there are some thousand such 

 graduates in the country and there is a steady demand for them. They 

 soon rise to hold the best positions in the shops, and the owners of the 

 shops are sending their sons to these colleges to obtain the kind of educa- 

 tion that will be of most use to them. Some of the graduates are now 

 old enough to have sons of college age, and they are sending them to 

 the same college. Such, I predict, will be the course of the agricultural 

 colleges. The graduates of this College will soon be the superintendents 

 and owners of the best farms in the country, and they will send their 

 sons here in ever increasing numbers. 



Meanwhile it is the duty of those interested in the College, as pro- 

 fessors, instructors and graduates, not to cease from their work of 

 educating the farmers of the State as to the usefulness of the College, 

 Let them through their College paper, through the agricultural papers 

 of the country and through Farmers' Institutes and fairs, cause the 

 work of the College to become known, and in due time the farmers will 

 come to believe in the College, not only as a place to which they should 

 send their sons, but as a direct benefit to the whole State, as an institu- 

 tion which is so important to the welfare of the State as a whole that 

 it will never fail to receive their support when its needs compel it to ask 

 additional appropriations from the legislature. 



Let us now consider a few thoughts which lead up to the belief that 

 the Agricultural College is not in any sense a charitable institution ex- 

 isting for the benefit of its students, nor even a class institution pro- 

 vided for the benefit of the agricultural interests at the expense of the 

 taxpayers at large, but rather as a State investment which will return 

 to the State its cost a hundred times over, an institution designed to 

 safeguard the State against the dangers of the industrial and commercial 

 wars of the future, just as West Point is designed to safeguard the 

 nation against foreign invasion. 



In New York city there exists an apprentices' library founded by the 

 "Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, which was instituted over a cen- 

 tury ago. On the walls of the library hangs the ancient banner of the 

 society, with its emblem and its motto. The emblem is an uplifted right 

 arm with the hand gras])ing a hammer, and the motto is the quaint 

 couplet, "By hammer and hand all arts do stand." Such was the honor 

 given to the hammer and the hand as the foundation of industrial art 

 over a hundred vears ago. If we were asked to frame a motto at the 



