351 



Uomaud that, in the practical workings of society, your interests shall 

 be cared for; that while common schools and literary colleges receive 

 the fostering care and bountiful endowments of the Government, the 

 farmers' school demands the like support. 



We would have you, too, constantly to summon yourselves to the bar 

 of your own consciences, to contemplate the duty you owe to your own 

 children, to compare tlie life of ignorance, as it gropes along in its dif- 

 ficult path, that seems to have no other object than that it may breathe 

 and live and die, with the brightened intellect of the intelligent man, 

 wlijj acts' under the influence of thought, who moves in a sphere of 

 usefulness and thrift, and whdse steps onarJ^ the path he treads through 

 life. 



To the merchant and mechanic, the active and energetic motive 

 powers of busy life, we address ourselves and ask you to look with 

 favor upon any project which sliall have for its object tl^e education of 

 the farmer. The busy marts of men are filled with the products of his 

 labors ; his success and his profits contribute largely to the trade and 

 commerce which are the product of your enterprise. While the abun-. 

 dant yield of the husbandman enriches him, the result is favorably felt 

 in every department of the merchant's counting-house and the mechanic's 

 shop. As, then, you move and make your impress upon the minds of 

 men, let your actions be tempered with the idea that all business, 

 whether in the merchant's store, the mechanic's shop, or the mariner's 

 ship upon the ocean, is dependent for its working elements upon the 

 l)roducts of the farm. 



To the professor and the student, to you who already possess the 

 lights of reason and enjoy the fruits of knowledge, we will not appeal in 

 vainvthat your influence may be thrown into the scale of agricultural 

 progress ; that, while you have in your own hands that helm of power 

 which gives direction to the elements of government, you will always' 

 have in mind that to promote the true aufl efficient principles of political 

 economy, to expand and increase the influence of that virtue whereby 

 alone we may hope to maintain our own free Government and laws, is 

 to educate the farmer. 



»We ask or the statesman, while he advocates the interests of his con- 

 stituents at the Ipar of the Senate ; of the lawyer, who advocates the 

 cause of his client at the bar of justice, and of that sacred office which 

 advocates the cause of man at the bar of Heaven, that they may ever 

 remember the magnitude of your temporal as well as eternal welfare. 



Let us not forget to exhort her, whose influence is always so strongly 

 marked upon the character of men from their cradle to their grave, to 

 think of these things : the mother, whose aft'ections root so deeply in 

 the existence of her child, whose anticipations are so often stimulated 

 to painful anxiety for its welfare, vfho watches its i^rogress in life with 

 an eye to doubt and danger, whose hopes may be eleva-ted to the Giver 

 of all good, that he has smiled graciously upon the career of her darling 

 child, or whose fearful forebodings may be realized in the spectacle that 

 he is despised by the society of men and frowned upon by the attributes 

 of Heavpn. 



In conclusion, I have a word to say with regard to these your annually 

 occurring exhibitions. Here all is reality. You meet your friends, who 

 are embarked in the same enterprise of life and whose thoughts and 

 heart* are congenial with your own. You see many of whom you before 

 had but heard ; and here, too, you learn to realize the force of numbers, 

 of intelligence, of the strength of which you are composed, and that 

 power which may be wielded by your will. You carry to your homes. 



