PRESIDENT S ADDRESS — SECTION K. 247 



a man is a physician or a lawyer it does not follow that his 

 children will acquire even rudimemtary knowledge of medicine or 

 law. With the- agriculturist, on the other hand, see how 

 different are things. He belongs, in the first place, to one of 

 the few callings from which modern conditions have been unable 

 to eradicate the hereditary principle. Apart from personal pre- 

 dilections, in the great majority of cases, a man becomes a farmer 

 because be was bom and bred on a farm ; because his father 

 owns a farm or farm plant and material, which, in the course of 

 time, he hopes to inherit and put to good use. Again, the farm- 

 bred lad, even if he wished it, cannot hope to escape the all-per- 

 vading influence of the paternal occupation; from his earliest 

 days it meets him on all sides, his boyish interests centre around 

 it, and his usual earliest ambition is to take^ a man's share in it. 

 True, with many, ere manhood is reached, farm life comes in time 

 to pall, particularly when parents are injudiciously exacting cr 

 over-grasping. In the main, however, the groundwork of tech- 

 nical training may be said to suiTound the farm-lad at home, 

 and to force itself upon his notice from his earliest days in 

 favorable or unfavorable light. In the circumstances, there- 

 fore, can we wonder that the great bulk of those following 

 agricultural pursuits are in the main home-trained, have always 

 been home-trained, and will probably always be home-trained? 

 Nor is this a fact wholly peculiar to our own special conditions, 

 but, rather, is it universal in its application, wherever agriculture 

 happens to he practised. Moreover, under conditions such as ours, 

 thei usual scantiness of available* labour, and the usual agricul- 

 tural incompetence of much of it that is at times available, serve 

 to tighten the father's grip on the farm-bred lad who has reached 

 the age when outside technical training becomes possible; and 

 liowever tempting the future advantages which this training seems 

 to promise, the exigencies of the present will, in most cases, con- 

 tinue to bind the lad inexorably to' the farm. 



Now, although from these incontrovertible facts certain obvious 

 conclusions would appear to flow in logical sequence, we have still 

 to allow for the deflecting weight of considerations of another 

 order. It may, for instance, seem logical to conclude that 

 because the average farm lad is unable to benefit directly from 

 technical training provided by agricultural colleges and the like, 

 institutions of the kind are more or less superfluous ; but can this 

 honestly be said to be so ? Has such experience as we have shown 

 it to be so? Again, I think not. Indeed, it would not be diffi- 

 cult to show that the influence of agricultural colleges on general 

 agricultural progress has been very far from negligible, and from 

 the view-point of the State this is the factor that counts. If it be 

 true that the average farm lad is unable to take full advantage of 

 what they have to offer, exceptional ones are ablei to do so, and, 

 indeed, do do so to a greater extent than is generally suspected. 



