Farming 77 



you a visit again before I go for good and I shall probably 

 spend next winter on [the] farm. 



In June he wrote to Frederick Kingsbury from "Fair- 

 mount ' ' : 



I want to make myself useful in the world, to make others 

 happy, to help to advance the condition of Society, and 

 hasten the preparation for the Millennium, as well as other 

 things too numerous to mention. 



Now, how shall I prepare myself to exercise the greatest 

 and best influence in the situation of life I am likely to be 

 placed in. You know perhaps as well as I what that is — I 

 suppose it's not very great stretch of ambition to anticipate 

 my being a Country Squire in Old Connecticut in the course 

 of fifteen years. I should like to help then as far as I could 

 [to foster] in the popular mind generosity, charity, taste and 

 etc., — independence of thought of voting and of acting. 

 The education of the ignoble vulgus ought to be much im- 

 proved and extended. 



The Agricultural Interest greatly preponderates in 

 number and wealth in the state, but perhaps has the least 

 influence in Legislation. Lawyers whose sense of right and 

 truth is blunted by profession — the sense of law — and 

 traffickers who value themselves as they can make their own 

 interest appear — whether truly or not — the interest of 

 another, make our laws, make public opinion, because they 

 have had their intellectual faculties sharpened by practice 

 and education. Now the people-farmers and mechanics — the 

 producing classes that the rest live on — want to think and 

 judge for themselves, to cultivate the intellectual. 



There is happily a reminiscence written by Mrs. Frederick 

 Law Olmsted in 1920' of her husband's establishment on his 

 own farm at Staten Island and of the meeting of the Olmsted 

 and Perkins families. 



^Mrs, Olmsted died April 23, 1 921, at the age of ninety-one. 



