170 THE CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



I get five dollars for every grave I dig, and there probably 

 would be fifty deaths every year. So in three years I make 

 four hundred and fifty dollars. That looked pretty good. I 

 take the job, and in that three years only one man died. This 

 country is too healthy for an honest man." We sometimes get 

 into a country that is too healthy for an honest man, and 

 I want to ask you if your system of farm education is really 

 doing what it ought to for those old hillsides which the man 

 in Arizona longed for? Your college, and your experiment 

 station, your board of agriculture, your dairymen's associa- 

 tion, and your pomological society, your grange and all the 

 rest. Are these people trying to draw from the top of the 

 pile or are they starting as they should, down at the bot- 

 tom? Now you see what I am getting at, and you will tell 

 me that the lame, the halt and the blind of agriculture are 

 incurable. I have had men tell me that these men, these 

 prejudiced, backward, narrow men, cannot be reached, that 

 they cannot be taught and cannot be brought up, and they 

 have told me actually that they must die and let younger 

 men take their places. I have also been told that our pro- 

 gress must be through the survival of the fittest. How often 

 we hear that. Kill off the weaker and let only the strong 

 survive. Let only the strong men and great men live. Now, 

 my friends, in our system of farm education we have been 

 building on this theory of life to the strong and destruction 

 to the weak. I cannot agree with any such theory, for it 

 would have thrown me out of the race. It would have 

 thrown others who would have been unable to keep their 

 places in the conflict, the lame, the blind, the dull and the 

 stubborn. If you carry out the theory of the survival of 

 the fittest, what would have been left in life for us if there 

 were no sympathy and no men left to secure sacrifices for 

 the dull and the unfortunate? Shall those who are dull, un- 

 interesting and stubborn be condemned and denied their 

 share of farm education? In truth, I think the wisest of 

 our teachers and best men should be put into your little hill 

 schoolhouses. I think the most eloquent, and most divine, 



