MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 247 



They are inexpensive colleges for the people, where we all can 

 continue our school days and association, and where we can form just 

 as true friendship as we ever did in our younger days. Before these 

 organizations were formed and fostered, we longed for the society of 

 the intelligent and progressive spirits similar to those we associated 

 with while attending the high schools and colleges of our youth. 

 These post-graduating schools, I call them, will especially stimulate 

 and encourage that social nature which is famishing among the farmers, 

 and needs to be stimulated into culture by intelligent men and women 

 associating with each other in the same line line of research and labor^ 



The times demand these things. They are essential to our progress 

 and advanced mode of living. By them we shall reach a greater degree 

 of success in life-time, and be guarded from making many a blunder. 

 The starry heavens, reaching out into immensity of space, always 

 seemed cold and awe-stricken to me nniil 1 studied more carefully our 

 solar system and found out a little more of the individual nature of our 

 planets, and then the distance seemed to vanish, and the thought that 

 some of them were similar to our earth, perhaps inhabited, had days 

 and nights, years and months, seasons and system, and now, when I go 

 out into the night and see Mars in the sky, it is an object of admiration 

 and interest, and does not seem so far away. This Horticultural Society, 

 the Dairy and Poultry Association, will be the means of making us feel 

 that the State is not a vast uninhabited domain ; that we do not live so 

 far apart ; that we are bodies that have common interests, and that our 

 hopes and ambitions lie in the same orbit. It is doubly interesting to 

 you and me when we speak of Westport, to know that our genial sec- 

 retary lives there; or of Kansas City, that our old friend and president 

 lives there ; or of Boonville, ah ! there is our jolly Bell ; or of Sedalia, 

 there are our esteemed Mrs. Dugan and Prof. Kirk ; and so on all over 

 our commonwealth: we know that in Holden and Clinton, Springfield 

 and Columbia, Bluffton and Kirksville, Carthage and Moberly, Lee's 

 Summit and Lamonte, Green Ridge and Dunlap, and a score of other 

 places, there are those who esteem us and those whom we esteem. 



I ask of you whose experience is along this line, if it does not 

 seem more like living, if the State does not seem more like home, if 

 life has not had added to it a peculiar charm and reality that it never 

 had before, and that these Associations are immeasurable in the grandeur 

 of their mission? Can it not be truthfully said that our Associations 

 have added wealth to our years, charm to our association, strength to 

 our efforts and courage to our manhood ? Bo they not disperse selfish- 

 ness, enlarge our appreciation, enrich our experience, crowning all 

 with social joy? 



