128 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1900. 



But the money that is spent for schools is spent for a necessity, 

 not for a luxury. Education weakens the power of the dem- 

 agog, purifies politics, makes life better and happier, does away 

 with class legislation, and in many other ways is a blessing. 

 More of it will tend more and more to broaden and deepen 

 culture. 



But education must be fitted for the training of all men. 

 Americans must realize that they have to compete with men of 

 all nations, and unless education here keeps pace with that of 

 other countries, America will soon be doing the unskilled labor 

 of the world. 



For years to come, the great majority of the children of the 

 land will be educated in the city schools. And it seems as if 

 country bred boys usually distanced in the race of life their 

 competitors city bred, who where educated in the city schools. 

 It cannot be that the country schools are the best. The secret, 

 I think, is that the country boy gets at first hand from living 

 nature many things that the city boy gets from books or not at 

 all. It has been said that the individual has to go through in 

 his development all the experience and history of the race. 

 The ancient man's intimacy with nature was so close that it can 

 not be reduplicated in the experience of the city boy. If this 

 stage of communion with nature is left out of the boy's ex- 

 perience, he has lost something for which he can never make up 

 in later life. 



Prof. James of Harvard University says that the country boy 

 brought up in the midst of living nature, is always at home in 

 the world, wherever he is placed. To have been brought up 

 on the farm, to have handled tools, a boat, a gun, means much 

 to the boy ; and the experience will develop a sounder mental 

 tissue than can be developed in any other way. 



Without this intimate relation to nature in youth, the boy's 

 esthetic sense cannot be properly developed. It has been said 

 that one cannot be a poet, an imaginative writer, an artist, un- 

 less in his youth he has been in close contact with nature. City 

 schools tend to teach materialistic views of life. European 

 schools are far ahead of ours in some respects. In two ways 



