248 State Horticultural Society. 



One great man has said, "Give me a child until he is seven 

 years old; I care not who takes him afterwards." Another says, 

 "Let me make the songs of a nation, and who will make its laws?" 

 Make the environment of the children what it should be, their 

 work, their play, their study, their recreation, and the nation will 

 take care of itself. 



You have asked me to speak of Civics and School Gardens. 

 Do you think I am wandering from my subject? I am not, for the 

 problems of civics that a woman has to meet are those that touch 

 the home, the child. But the women have learned how closely the 

 welfare of the home is linked with that of the community. The old, 

 selfish, individualism is disappearing as they come together in 

 sympathetic co-operation ; it is not our home, but the home ; not 

 our children, but the children, of which they think. 



There is one word which, taken in its broadest sense, covers 

 the work of your Society and ours, of all organizations, that make 

 for the betterment of mankind — the word "education." Each in 

 its own particular field is striving to prepare man better for the 

 duties and pleasures of living. You may make laws, you may even 

 enforce them; but the power that creates a law-abiding people 

 comes not from without, but from within; not from coercion, but 

 from education. 



Have you heard Judge Lindsey, who is today perhaps the most 

 conspicuous champion of the child, tell of young lawbreakers as he 

 knows them ? He has a remedy for the evil, a very old one, which 

 we have always known, but which we seem strangely reluctant to 

 use, "work for idle hands to do." The child is like an engine; it 

 generates a certain amount of force, it must be used, but how? 



Here we come to the school garden. Set him to work, give 

 him something to do which has a tangible, interesting result, make 

 him a producer instead of a destroyer; and you have led him one 

 long step towards becoming a good citizen. 



We think and speak of the school garden as a comparatively 

 new departure in educational methods. Is this true? We are told 

 that 500 years before Christ, Cyrus made gardens in which the sons 

 of the Persian nobles were taught horticulture. We know little of 

 what was done for the next 2,000 years ; but in the sixteenth cen- 

 tury we find gardens established, for purposes of study, in nearly 

 all the larger cities of Italy. France and Germany followed, but 

 Austria seems to have been the first to recognize the school garden 

 in her school laws. We find a law in 1869 which says that wherever 

 practicable a garden and place of agricultural experiment shall be 



