LECTURES AND ESSAYS READ AT INSTITUTES. 183 



Again, ifc is sometimes objected that very few of the boys who go from the 

 farm to the college return again to the farm. 



I think this is not the case to any such extent as is generally supposed, and 

 perhaps if we were to give the matter the attention which it deserves we might 

 find that for the extent to which it is true the college is not to be blamed so 

 much as the influence by which the boys were surrounded before they came 

 to the college. 



The alumni of the college have an organization which not only meets tri- 

 ennially, but also collects and publishes from time to time certain statistics 

 from which we learn, among other things, the occupation of the graduates. 

 The last published statistics show that a little over one-half of the graduates 

 are actually engaged iu farming. 



Now, when the students first enter the college, they are required to fill out 

 a paper, which is filed in the secretary's oflSce, to be entered on the college 

 record. One of the things they state on this paper is tlie occupation that they 

 intend to engage in after leaving college. My assistant has made an exam- 

 ination of this record, and of the boys that have come to the Agricultural 

 College during the last four years, 38 per cent intend to be farmers after 

 they leave it. I have known personally of quite a number of young men 

 who came from the farm to the college, never intending to return to the farm, 

 but who had a love for the occupation first awakened in them at the college 

 by the discovery that it was an occupation furnishing ample scope for the best 

 trained minds, and one in which intelligent and well-directed labor was as 

 likely to be liberally rewarded as in most other occupations. The difiiculty 

 about keeping the boys on the farm is largely a thing of the past, and had its 

 origin in the humdrum methods and general lack of progress, that regarded 

 improvements as innovations and hard uniutellectual work as the only thing that 

 could succeed, and made intellectual growth an impossibility, and sneered at 

 "eddication" as something quite unnecessary if not a positive hindrance to a 

 farmer. 



How speedily all this has been changing during the lifetime of the present 

 generation. What a wave of intellectual quickening has rolled in upon the 

 entire agricultural community until to-day the sun shines on no more intel- 

 ligent class of workers than the farmers of America. They have begun to 

 realize that agriculture has its best rewards not for physical force but for 

 science and good sense. And in these days of competition of the smaller and 

 older farms of the eastern and middle States with the great fertile valley of 

 the Mississippi and the extensive plains west of the Rocky Mountains, ignor- 

 ance and brute force will be left behind, and science and sense shall win the 

 prize. 



When I look at the harvester of the present, doing its work so grandly and 

 so speedily, cutting and binding as if by magic, and compare it witli the 

 harvest field of my boyhood, where we bent all day over a sickle, gathering the 

 grain by handfuls among stumps and stones, I cannot help regretting that I 

 had not been born a generation later, and if I had I do not believe there would 

 have been any difiiculty about keeping me on the farm. 



I think it an exceedingly silly objection to the Agricultural College that we 

 find a goodly number of its graduates in other occupations besides that of 

 farming. If the college only gave such a meagre special education as in the 

 opinion of some is best suited to the wants of the young farmer or mechanic, 

 and failing to discern and meet the necessity and propriety of an advanced 

 education for those engaged in such pursuits, assigning its students to inferior 



