TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL MEETING. 171 



and most humane of your preachers should go away from 

 your cities and out to the httle country churches where they 

 are most needed. You ask me why ? You say, why does 

 not Hartford, with its hundred thousand people, representing 

 greater wealth, higher culture and higher civilization de- 

 mand more consideration than the hill men that we talk about ? 

 Does not this Pomological Society exert a greater power 

 and influence and amount to more than the fifty thousand 

 men who will not join it? I will grant it. But have you 

 stopped to think where the power and culture of Hartford 

 came from, and where the strength of this society will lead 

 to unless in some way it is fed and sustained in the future 

 by this rugged strength of your hill men and from your 

 hill farms. Do you not know, my friends, that all history 

 shows that the growth of the rest of the state is at the ex- 

 pense of the country? The wealth of the world poured into 

 Rome, Athens and Carthage out of the farming districts, 

 from the country, out of every conquered province, and with 

 that wealth came culture and education following it, but it 

 was in the hands of a comparative few. The brilliant and 

 flaming civilization was built up, but its roots were never 

 deeply imbedded in the soil, and it fell. And who was it 

 who pulled it down? I ask you that. It was the men who 

 came from the desert, the men who came out of the civiliza- 

 tion of the northern forests, where for centuries they had 

 brooded over the monopoly of wealth, and monopoly of pow- 

 er, and the monopoly of education in the towns and cities. 

 They felt that they had been denied those things, and al- 

 though they were uneducated barbarians, many of them, it 

 was their strength which pulled down the Roman civiliza- 

 tion, and it is always strength which in the last analysis is 

 the dominant power, and which rules the world. I simply do 

 not want our farm education to go that way. A method 

 must be found of reaching and building up the district 

 schools of our farming regions. Let us suppose that Rome 

 and Athens had given those conquered provinces a square 

 deal. Suppose instead of exploiting them, conquering the 



