No. 4.] AGRICULTURAL COLLEGES. 51 



THE MISSION OF THE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGES. 



BY DR. W. H. JORDAN, GENEVA, N. T. 



This meeting of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture 

 is to me an occasion of great significance. You who are 

 here may have thought of it as not unlike other meetings, 

 neither greater nor less. I asl^your indulgence, neverthe- 

 less, while I present to you what lies in my mind as the real 

 meaning and the far-reaching relations of this event. 



First of all, this is a college town, one whose name is 

 familiar wherever in this land ambitious young manhood is 

 scanning the opportunities offered to American boys for 

 acquiring an education either in the liberal arts or in the 

 sciences. You have here the refinement of thought, the in- 

 tellectual activities and that general uplift of mind and heart, 

 which are so generally characteristic of the social status in a 

 community dominated by college influence. Moreover, this 

 is a New England town, a Massachusetts town, which means 

 that it is in the very midst of a people imbued with a love 

 of learning, whose fireside traditions have been the inspira- 

 tion of many sons and daughters when they have turned 

 their faces toward the school or the college. The history of 

 our progress, moral and intellectual, can certainly not ignore, 

 and some of us can never forget, those examples of labor 

 and of sacrifice exhibited by New England homes in order 

 that sons and daughters might stand in the forefront of op- 

 portunity for acquiring a larger stature of mind and soul. 

 How immeasurably is this new republic indebted to the aspi- 

 rations of the common people who have lived and who still 

 live in this small group of our smaller States ! I do not 

 flatter when I declare that such a community as this is one 

 of the springs that feed the current of good in business and 

 social life which makes for the salvation of our nation. 



