R. C. WINTHROFS ADDRESS. 639 



In the next place, government, State, and National, can en- 

 courage agricultural science, and promote agricultural educa- 

 tion. 



This subject has been so nearly exhausted, during the last 

 year or two, by President Hitchcock's Report to our own legis- 

 lature, by Dr. Lee's Reports to the Patent Office at Washing- 

 ton, and by the lectures and addresses in which it has been 

 treated in all parts of the country, that I propose to notice it 

 very briefly. 



Undoubtedly the noble system of common school education, 

 which is already in existence among us, and for which we can 

 never be too grateful to our Puritan Fathers, is itself no small 

 aid to the cause of agriculture. The farmers, and the farmers' 

 children, enjoy their full share of its benefits. It furnishes that 

 original subsoil ploughing to the youthful mind which is essen- 

 tial to the success of whatever other culture it may be destined to 

 undergo. There is no education, after all, which can take the 

 place of reading, writing, and keeping accounts ; and the young 

 man who is master of these elemental arts, and whose eye has 

 been sharpened by observation, and his mind trained to reflection, 

 and his heart disciplined to a sense of moral and religious res- 

 ponsibility, — and these are the great ends and the great achieve- 

 ments of our common schools, — will not go forth to the work 

 of his life, whether it be manual or mental, whether of the 

 loom or the anvil, of the pen or the plough, without the real, 

 indispensable requisites for success. The great secret and 

 solution of the wonderful advance which has been witnessed 

 of late years, in all the useful arts, has been the union of the 

 thinking mind and the working hand in the same person. 

 Heretofore, for long ages, they have been everywhere separated. 

 One set of men have done the thinking, and another set of 

 men have done the working. The land has been tilled, the 

 loom has been tended, the hammer and the hoe have been 

 wielded, by slaves, or by men hardly more intelligent or inde- 

 pendent than their brute yoke-fellows. In other countries, to 

 a considerable extent, and even in our own, so far as one region 

 and one race are concerned, this separation still exists. But a 

 great change has been brought about by the gradual progress 

 of free institutions ; and, in the free States of our own country 

 especially, we see a complete combination of the working hand 



