306 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



who has read Sir Horace Plunkett's "Ireland in the New Century." 



When these times come to this country, if they ever do, I 

 fervently hope that by that time our secondary schools will have 

 become so well organized and so broadly equipped as to handle the 

 trade school together with that higher form of industrial education 

 which now engages our attention. 



The American farmer is not a peasant. He has never yet been 

 peasantized, and I fervently hope he never will be peasantized. He 

 belongs mostly to the ancient and honorable Puritan stock de- 

 scended from that great middle class of England that came to this 

 country to establish and maintain not aristocratic, but democratic 

 institutions. This is the stock that first felled trees, then built 

 churches and school-houses, and prepared to govern themselves 

 and to found a nation and a race whose institutions should rest on 

 the intelligent activity of all the people. 



This stock has never been exceeded, not only for hardihood 

 and industry, but for its appreciation of the benefits of higher 

 education and of the better things of life. This people held three 

 things to be cardinal virtues — to labor, to go to church, and to go 

 to school. This is the people that founded Harvard College in the 

 wilderness. It is from stock of this sort that the typical American 

 farmer is descended, and I would see him so trained and so educated 

 as to remain true to his type for all time. This will require a train- 

 ing and an education that cannot be imparted by any form of 

 European peasant school, however modified ; but it will require the 

 best that modern human ingenuity can devise. This great need 

 will be met, when it is met if ever, not by old, but by new systems 

 of education, and they must be wrought by ourselves to meet con- 

 ditions here. 



3. To educate the children of different classes separately is 

 to prevent that natural flow of individuals from one profession into 

 another which is in every way desirable, both from the public and 

 the private standpoint. If the children of farmers are systemati- 

 cally put into schools where only agriculture is taught, many a good 

 lawyer and many a good citizen will be spoiled to make an indiffer- 

 ent farmer. Boys do not necessarily inherit the father's profession. 

 In a very large sense their natural faculties come from that com- 

 mon stock of human characters that constitute the heritage of the 

 race and the individual has a right to an education that is broader 

 than the occupation and the narrow environment in which he was 

 born. True, he should be educated through and to a large extent 



