Summer Meeting. 149 



and failed there is little encouragement for the members of a horticul- 

 tural society to undertake the solution of it. I sometimes think that one 

 reason a remedy has not been found is because, as a rule, the best writers 

 and thinkers are of a calling other than farmers and are not sufhciently 

 interested in the welfare of the farmer's boy to undertake the solution 

 of the question. It is a fact that until recently the educators in all our 

 institutions of learning, save in part the agricultural colleges, have given 

 very little thought to the farmer's boy or his special interests. But they 

 are to be blamed only in part for the laws (at least in Missouri) and the 

 rules and regulations of all the higher institutions of learning practically 

 bar the farmer's boy from obtaining the education that would cause him 

 to love the farm and remain on it. 



It is a fact that a majority of the farmer's boys at the age of sixteen 

 or seventeen, when they have got the little that they can get in their 

 small country school, and that in a direction from, rather than to, the farm, 

 are inclined to go away, some to the cities, some to the railroads and some 

 become professional tramps. I have in mind one who left the farm at 

 not quite sixteen and brags that he tramped 2,500 miles without a cent of 

 money or a change of clothing. Had he been properly trained at home 

 and received the right kind of an education in his school he would not be 

 so inclined and there would yet be some hope of making of him a useful 

 man, but I fear he has gone too far now and that it is too late to make 

 anything of him. 



It is gratifying to write that the question of elementary agriculture 

 in the district school is now being so thoughtfully agitated all over the 

 country and that many of our foremost educators are indorsing it and 

 ..some of the states have already adopted it. The district school is strictly 

 the farmer's, it is his high school, his college, his university. A large 

 majority of farmer's boys can not hope to get anything more in the way 

 of an education than they get in their district school. After agriculture 

 is introduced and boys have finished in the district school and acquired 

 a taste for such an education many of them will go to some agricultural 

 college and acquire that degree of educated intelligence that will cause 

 him to appreciate, love and enjoy the farm and enable him to run the 

 farm with a greater degree of pleasure and profit. This little taste of 

 agriculture and horticulture in the common schools will be like the ava- 



