62 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



poses to be a farmer can afford to spend four years in col- 

 lege. 



But travel with me in imagination one hundred miles over 

 these New England hills, survey the farms, large and small, 

 smooth and rough, near the markets and remote from 

 markets, with desirable social environment and isolated from 

 social life, and tell me, not on the basis of what might be 

 if millenial conditions prevailed, but on the basis of what a 

 trained business judgment would accept, the proportion of 

 those farms you could conscientiously recommend as offering 

 attractive business inducements to young men which should 

 cause them to spend four years and several hundred dollars 

 in preparation for the very limited opportunities which 

 attend some of those remote and unpromising fields. It is 

 certainly Utopian to expect a much larger proportion of 

 college-educated men among farmers than in any other 

 important industrial class. I doubt if well-informed agri- 

 culturists, in passing judgment upon other classes, are 

 prepared to assert that the mechanics in our workshops, 

 where intelligent, skilful labor, accompanied- by more 

 or less knowledge of principles, is demanded, should 

 generally be college graduates. They would not claim 

 this of the commercial world. It is self-evident that some 

 mechanics and business men should be, or even must be, 

 highly trained, but it would be foolish to expect this of 

 more than a small minority. What farmers are not justified 

 in claiming for these others, they may not reasonably expect 

 in their own ranks. Every calling has its gradations of 

 opportunity, with corresponding gradations of encourage- 

 ment for the investment of intellectual capital. No business 

 will ever be an exception to this rule. There are many 

 openings in agriculture, — and these are on the increase — 

 that offer encouraging recompense to the man who has taken 

 his baccalaureate degree ; but on the farm, as everywhere 

 else, the law of supply and demand is in force. 



Now, my friends, remember these things when you are 

 tempted to criticise agricultural colleges because more gradu- 

 ates are not farmers. Do not forget that conditions more 

 powerful than any influences which college halls may exert 

 are determining the life work of your sons and daughters. 



