AGRICULTCJEAL HEART-WORK. 21 



AGRICULTURAL HEART-WORK. 



From an Address before the Middlesex Agricultural Society, Sept. 29, 1857 



BV CHARLES BABBIDGE. 



It is not sufficient that we have an intellectual perception of 

 a truth. We must feel a personal and earnest interest in that 

 truth ; otherwise, it affects us as little as the mirror is affected 

 by the object it reflects. We know many things — that they are 

 true, important, and of pressing necessity, and yet they exert 

 little or no practical influence over us. We know that there 

 are many duties which we owe to ourselves, the community in 

 which we live, the country of which we are citizens, the race 

 in whose welfare we have a common interest. But it is not 

 mere knowledge, which makes either the faithful parent, the 

 unflinching patriot, or the devoted philanthropist. Neither 

 will knowledge make a good farmer. He cannot be a good 

 farmer without it. And this brings me to my first position. I 

 should have said point, only I might have forgotten myself, and 

 supposed I was preparing a sermon. I assume that the pro- 

 gress which has been made in agricultural science, has a 

 tendency to discourage, rather than encourage agricultural 

 labor. The farmer's son, hoping not merely to make his toil a 

 little more dignified, but also a little more profitable, proceeds 

 to post himself up in the philosophy of the thing. He reads 

 Liebig and Johnston, and many others, not forgetting our own 

 Dana. He becomes learned in the nature of soils, their con- 

 stitutional elements in the processes of vegetation, their 

 exhaustive tendencies and results, and he finds as the sum total 

 of the whole matter, that in order to keep up the productive- 

 ness of the old farm, he has got to work like a galley slave ; 

 otherwise, the whole concern goes by the board. It is work, 

 work, work, morning, noon and night, year in, and year out^ — 



