196 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



1. GLASNEV1N AGRICULTURAL SCHOOL. 



I promised in my former Report to give some further account 

 of the school at Glasnevin ; and since that time the intelligent 

 and obliging superintendent has been kind enough to furnish 

 me with a copy of his farm accounts for two years, which I 

 think must be interesting to my readers. It is obviously a great 

 question whether an institution of this character can be made to 

 support itself; and this question is affirmatively and emphat- 

 icalty answered by the result in this case. It is obviously 

 highly desirable that education should be made as cheap as 

 possible. I very well understand what often comes of making 

 things cheap ; that when the price is reduced, the quality of the 

 article is made to correspond. A milkman in New York once 

 told me that he always accommodated his customers as to the 

 price ; six and a quarter cents was the standard price for sound 

 and pure milk ; but if his customers wished to have it at five or 

 four cents, he took care always to put enough water with it to 

 bring it to the standard price. This honest fellow, who was a 

 shrewd Irishman, by the way, (an evidence that all the wooden 

 nutmegs are not made in New England,) was pleased also to tell 

 me that, by straining water through some finely-ground Indian 

 meal or flour, so as to color it, and adding to it a mere dash of 

 skimmed milk, he was able then to afford it at three cents a 

 quart to those who could not give a higher price. Most 

 certainly I cannot recommend, in this sense of the word, a cheap 

 education : but if the advantages of a good, solid, and enlarged 

 education can be made universally acceptable ; if they can be 

 purchased by that which most young persons have, and besides 

 which many young men have nothing else which they can give, 



opinions are certainly just objects of animadversion, I can only express the wish, 

 that they both might be transported, at least for a while, to a land of free institu 

 tions, where education is universal, and learn there, that education, from its 

 high moral influences, may have other uses than that of putting money into men s 

 pockets ; and that, where the road of advancement and promotion is freely and 

 equally open to all, even the humblest in the community may ascend to a noble 

 ness of merit, and character, and intellectual elevation, before which the tinsel 

 splendor of coronets, and mitres, and maces, becomes dim, and they are seen in 

 their proper character, as mere baubles for grown-up children. 



