382 HIGHER AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. 



as a farmer, lie will work in the field, or nursery, or shop, as 

 cheerfully as he plays, and more cheerfully than many study.&quot; 



What is the education of most of our students worth on grad 

 uation day? Many a commencement occasion has brought to 

 me only a painful sense of the utter helplessness of the young 

 men and women graduates to make a living. I have received 

 scores of letters from students, one, two, and three years after 

 leaving college, asking for advice, for positions, for help in 

 making their way in the world; for their training had only fitted 

 them for the professions, and these are overcrowded and full. 

 Now, suppose this training had been industrial equal in every 

 respect to the other, but differently directed. As a skilled me 

 chanic, as a foreman or manager of a farm, or farmer on his 

 own hook, he can at once command sixty dollars a month; he 

 has not to wait from two to five years to wedge his way into a 

 paying practice. The wages of a young man from sixteen to 

 twenty years of age are worth, including his board, at least 

 thirty dollars a month, or the interest on $3,600, at the rate of 

 ten per cent. If he comes out of college a skillful mechanic or 

 farmer, he has doubled his capital; if he has only got ready to 

 begin the study of a profession, he has in a strictly business 

 point of view, sunk it in a venture which may or may not reim 

 burse him after many years. If he has made the great and 

 almost universal mistake of studying without a definite purpose 

 or aim, without a definite occupation to which his efforts have 

 been constantly directed, this is almost certain to be true. As 

 President Anderson, of the Kansas College, says: &quot;It is time 

 for men to look the educational question squarely in the face, 

 and to substitute common sense for traditional and groundless 

 sentimentality.&quot; 



We are now beginning to understand that a sound mind is 

 not to be expected in an unsound or half-developed body, and 

 even the purely literary colleges are encouraging competitive 

 muscularity in a way that would have caused John Harvard and 

 Elihu Yale to shake in their shoes. What is there more inter 

 esting in a boat race than in a plowing match? Is the power 

 ignoble which is applied to the spade or the plane, and other 

 wise when it holds the ball club, or boxing glove ? Is it so much 

 greater an accomplishment to say horse in half a dozen lan 

 guages, than to know how to breed and care for one, until the 

 beast has become more than half human in his beauty and in- 



