182 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



farms are intelligently managed, and more than all that, that 

 our labor is well paid. 



You may say that all this can be done, and that agricultural 

 education can be obtained without a college ; that a man does 

 not need to be able to decline a Latin noun and conjugate a 

 Greek verb, scan a line in Homer, and break his neck over an- 

 other one in Horace, in order to be a good farmer. I agree that 

 that is not necessary ; but it is necessary that a man in this 

 world, in order to maintain his position as a farmer, a mechanic, 

 a merchant, or a lawyer, should know as much as he can know. 

 It is astonishing, my friends, how we respect an intelligent man 

 who can give good reasons for the mode in which he transacts 

 his business. How we all admire to listen to the great results 

 of mental labor and investigation. How we sat in silent admi- 

 ration last evening, and heard the greatest naturalist of the 

 world discuss in his inimitable style the simplest questions, 

 merely because we bow to his knowledge and believe in it. 

 Hence it is that the education of a college elevates a man in 

 his own power for good, and more than all that, elevates him 

 in the estimation of his neighbors, if he employs his knowledge 

 in a useful pursuit. With us, moreover, the whole business of 

 farming is a special business. It is not a wholesale, ill-arranged 

 affair ; it is the application of the highest intelligence to the nicest 

 cultivation of the farm. The time when the wholesale business of 

 farming in Massachusetts was as profitable as I told you it once 

 was, has long since passed away. I doubt if there is a man in 

 Massachusetts, the owner of large lands, who could possibly 

 adopt the agricultural system of his fathers and succeed as a 

 farmer. Then, it was a little hay to sell ; it was a few cattle 

 fattened upon these luxuriant hill-sides ; it was a few bushels of 

 corn ; it was a little grain ; it was a few potatoes ; it was simple 

 habits of home ; it was low taxation ; it was cheap labor. That 

 is a true picture of the old times, is it not ? But now the time 

 has come when every man who proposes to get an income from 

 the land must apply himself to some special business, and apply 

 to that business the best rules that can possibly be taught him 

 by the most skilful practical farmers, and the best science you 

 can obtain from the Agricultural College. It is the cultivation, 

 for instance, of great root crops, — onions, mangolds, turnips, — 

 economically, successfully, profitably, that makes the farmers of 



