76 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



be educated, or shall they not be educated? The States, 

 looking into the years to come, say, if democracy is to main- 

 tain itself long in these United States, these people must be 

 educated. As to the method of education, how shall they be 

 educated ? Can they be educated by taking a dead language 

 and putting themselves back of the time of two thousand 

 years ago? That is perfectly impossible. What must they 

 understand? First, the earth on which they stand, and then 

 the forces by which they are surrounded. Let a man under- 

 stand the earth and the powers of the heavens, let him master 

 the soil and the lightning, let him master the secrets of life, 

 and that man is educated, though he may not be able to read 

 Sanscrit, Hebrew or Greek. We have had a trial of about 

 thirty years of this method, and we are producing men who 

 can hold their own against any classical institution. We are 

 giving such a good training; to the men who so out of our 

 colleges that the ministers, the lawyers and the doctors all 

 want to send their sons to our colleges ; but the word "agri- 

 culture " is not tony enough. They say, "Rub out the word 

 agriculture, and then we will send all of our boys to the col- 

 lege." Now, we do not want to do that, but we can make 

 the training so thoroughly practical that the time will come 

 when it will be fashionable to send students to the agricult- 

 ural college rather than to the others. The classical colleges 

 were originated in the first place to train ministers, and were 

 supported by contributions from the churches. A charitable 

 contribution in the course of a century cannot establish that 

 which the State can secure. So we find in the west and here 

 in the east that the State institutions are establishing them- 

 selves, and they are educating the citizens. 



Our college is only thirty years old. Wait until it is a hun- 

 dred or two hundred years old, backed up by the support of 

 the contributions of the State and of the United States, then 

 you will see a magnificent future before us. Therefore I think 

 we should not always confine ourselves to the individual 

 point of view of the farmer's boy who is in the college to-day, 

 but to the generations which are to come. We are laying the 

 foundations here not for the closing years of this century, 

 but for all of the coming centuries which are before us. The 

 plan is right, the opportunity is ripe, and I am perfectly as- 



