SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 43 



Have we not been repeating these words in later years and 

 fancied we were proposing something new ? Again Mr. Lothrop 

 said: 



While our governments, both national and state, are truly liberal and 

 pour out their money like water in the establishment of literary and other 

 public institutions, and dot our land over with theological seminaries, 

 with law seminaries, with medical seminaries, and with military seminaries, 

 poor agriculture, whose hand sows the seed, and whose arm gathers the 

 harvest on which all our earthly comforts and even our very existence 

 depend, as yet has no seminary in which to teach her sons the most valu- 

 able of all arts. 



Mr. Lothrop also outlined a Women's Department as 

 follows : 



As I have impressed strongly on those gentlemen who have sons, the 

 importance of educating them thoroughly in the business in which they 

 are destined to follow, let me say a word to you who have daughters: In 

 addition to a daily and thorough training in the care and labor of the dairy 

 and all household affairs, educate them in everything that will have a 

 tendency to make them plain, modest, sensible, and useful women and 

 fit companions for those of our sons who shall become scientific and prac- 

 tical farmers. Teach them that industry is honorable and adds to their 

 charms, and that the domestic circle is to be the theater of their future 

 fame and glory. 



Forty-seven years later this College established a course for 

 women, a course which proposes to give the training that Mr. 

 Lothrop named as essential for women. 



The members of the Constitutional Convention of 1850 

 evidently had heard something of this movement for agricultural 

 education and embodied in that constitution the provision that 

 the legislature should as soon as practicable establish a school 

 of agriculture. But legislatures do not always adopt new meas- 

 ures "as soon as practicable ." They often need the prodding 

 of the people behind them to urge them along. But the people 

 who organized the Agricultural Society had in mind an institu- 

 tion which should develop work which the society could only 

 begin or barely suggest. 



