AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 5 



also, as wasted ; were it not that farming is often devoid of what gives it pleasantness and 

 dignity, we might hope that many would seek an education in order the better to be farmers. 



Professor Andrew P. Peabody, of Harvard University, jays with truth : " To restore the 

 deranged balance to society, its old honor must be rendered back to labor. Industrial pur- 

 suits must be raised in respectability and dignity above the lower walks of commerce, and 

 fully to a level with its higher departments and functions. Both agriculture and handicraft 

 must be made liberal professions. This can be effected only by stocking them with men of 

 liberal culture, for it is not the profession that gives character and standing to the man, but 

 the man to the profession. Our agricultural colleges and our industrial institutes," be goes 

 on to say, " aresupplying the needed culture, and are going to replenish the field and the work- 

 shop with a new order of large and high-minded operatives, men of liberal tastes, pursuits 

 and aims, who will do honor to their respective callings, and make them seem worthy the 

 noblest ambition of the aspiring youth of the coming generation."* 



Who, looking over this fair peninsula, noting how largely farmers exceed any other class 

 in numbers, and that agriculture is the mother of arts, can bear to believe that its ranks of 

 farmers must continue to be depleted of the educated ones of their sons, that a social and 

 political distance between fanners and those in professions shall grow up and widen, that 

 the greater discipline and knowledge is to be usurped by the capitalists, and that agriculture 

 is to remain longer stationary while all other trades are moving on. 



The wide public domain, the facility afforded in a new country for acquiring ownership in 

 land, the unexhausted riches of our soil, all put far off the evil day when large estates shall 

 eat up the smaller, and the tiller, become the slave, of the soil. But without education 

 among farmers, the processes of the old world will be renewed here. Out of their ranks the 

 lawyers, capitalists, soldiers, are both raised and fed, only to look back upon farming as 

 something happily escaped ; to be praised and shunned. 



NEWSPAPERS AND CLUBS. 



No means of education can compare with the newspapers and periodicals. In the West- 

 ern Farmer for Dec. 17, 1871, it is stated that there were but six agricultural papers in the 

 United States in 1833. Now about one hundred agricultural papers, or an increase more 

 than thirty times as great as that ot our population, and well edited columns in other papers, 

 spread amongst hundreds of thousands of readers their weekly, or monthly records of agri- 

 cultural progress and experiments. So there were in 1833, but four agricultural societies in the 

 United States. In June, 1872, 1,980 such societies and clubs, reported to the Department 

 of Agriculture in Washington, and Michigan alone sent in the names of 58 ; and one has 

 only to read the annual programme of such a club as the Volinia, ask after the discussions 

 and experiments of one like the Romeo, or secure a list of the lectures and papers presented 

 to one like the Mason club, to be aware of their great educating influence. The grangers 

 also, by discussing in their meetings, a still wider range of topics, embracing not only prac- 

 tical farming, but the relation of the business to the other industries of the world cannot 

 but prompt its members and the communities they are in to set a high value on education. 

 My purpose, however, does not lead me to dwell on these means of agricultural education, 

 great although they be. The history of education shows us that the college is also needed. 

 The scientific schools of the world, although the students in them form but a small propor- 

 tion of the army of laborers in the business they teach, mining, engineering, designing, 

 manufactures, still have had immense influence in furthering the arts. They are the head 

 quarters of that scientific grounding and systematic presentation of principles and practice 

 that must be found somewhere in every art and profession. Into this field, agricultural col- 

 leges are but lately entered, in this country at least, and I turn your attention to our own. 



MICHIGAN AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE. 



The Michigan Agricultural College does not stand alone. It is a part of an educational 

 system, haying as its head the University, especially in its highest sphere, as a school of 

 literary, philological, philosophical, and scientific knowledge, in their purest forms and high- 

 est elements. Below this stand, the professional schools, law, medicine, and. as I conceive, 

 no way inferior in rank, the Normal School, the Agricultural College, the schools of en- 

 gineering, mining, pharmacy, and whatever else may either at Ann Arbor or elsewhere edu- 

 cate chiefly for some designated business in life. Then comes our Union Schools and our 

 primary schools, in the popular sense. The system is one. Jealousies are nowhere more out 

 of place than in the members of such a household, and, I believe, have no existence. Each 

 one has a deep educational interest in the highest prosperity of all the others. 



ITS SPHERE. 



Happily, therefore, we in this State arc relieved of many of the questions that perplexed 

 Smithsonian Report, 1872, p. 194. 



