230 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



that culture has made so easy and so spontaneous? Habit, say they, has : 

 made them easy and spontaneous. Well, call it habit if you will ; that is but 

 another name for culture, the constant holding up of truth and right before 

 the mind till they are mirrored in the soul — till self-interest and force, if 

 they ever existed, have been eliminated from human thought and human 

 motive. I prefer to believe that the good qualities of our being have been 

 cultivated, have been tilled, have been dug around and fertilized and 

 watered till there has been a harvest of culture, of good for the sake of the 

 good, of justice because it is right; that it is, as Emerson says, "the sug- 

 gestion of certain best thoughts " instead of the demonstration of selfish- 

 ness. 



Of course all these manisfestations of the finer sensibilities pay in the long 

 run, and poor Richard can well say that "honesty is the best policy," but 

 the better and sweeter fruits grow in the life that exemplifies this condition 

 of culture without a thought of policy. Then there is evidence of culture.. 

 As soon as it smacks of traffic, of the shop, of policy, it is greed, not culture. 

 They pay, not because they are politic, but because they are in harmony 

 with truth, and truth elevates. 



Thus culture is the unwritten law that compels society to do the right 

 thing at the right time, in the right way. Its order is an impulse rather 

 than a law. When it has become a second nature, if by chance it never was 

 first nature, it raises the race from barbarism to civilization — the whole 

 plane of manhood is elevated. 



This general culture, then, is not a matter of a day nor an age. The ele- 

 ments of a constitution are to be found in the first glimmer of history. Our 

 constitution, written a little over a century ago, in many of its essentials is so^ 

 old that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. Law and liberty, 

 culture and civilization, have come to us hand in hand, almost with equal pace. 

 In the capacity of the race, in the blood and wrong, in the fierce struggle for 

 dominion, in the contests between peasant and baron, king and noble, in the 

 dark hours of the darkest night to humanity and human rights, amidst all 

 there comes down to us the occasional gleam of a better life, a brighter hope, 

 as the harbinger of the peace and good will to all men that some time was to 

 come. May we help the advent of the glorious day by each one's attention to 

 our personal culture, so that in the aggregate there shall be shining particles 

 enough to golden the mass. 



Much has been said and much written about the means of culture. Some 

 attribute its growth to the cultivation of letters, some to the study of man as 

 man. "Know thyself" is a cardinal maxim to all such. So far as literature 

 has preserved the best thought of men, it has furnished the soil for an, in- 

 creased product of cultured thought. Reason and memory are the primal 

 faculties that distinguish us from the brute creation. Literature has em- 

 balmed them for the future. Aristotle invented the tool which has been a 

 labor-saving machine in the region of classified thought from his day to this. 

 Homer sang the song that has sounded its manifold changes in poetry for 

 centuries. These men and others too numerous to mention, invented processes 

 and formulated aspirations that have been inherited by succeeding times as so 

 much capital for future intellectual growth and culture. How far mankind 

 has improved upon the models set is an open question, but there is no doubt 

 that at least in so far as they led we have followed in the upward way from 

 barbarism to civilization. 



