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due even more to our children, that the national soil should 

 not be impaired by our ignorance or our neglect. It is a 

 great trust-estate, of which each generation is entitled only 

 to the use, and for the strip and waste of which the grand 

 Proprietor of the Universe will hold us to account. 



Whether the promotion of agricultural education shall 

 be undertaken through systematic courses of scientific lec- 

 tures, or by agricultural schools and colleges, with experi- 

 mental farms attached to them, or by the preparation and 

 distribution of agricultural tracts and treatises, or by all 

 combined, it is for the farmers to say. What they say will 

 not fail to be rightly and eifectively said. With them 

 words will be things ; for no Government will venture to 

 resist their deliberate and united appeals. 



But let not the farmers, or the friends of the farmers, de- 

 ceive themselves. When all that can be desired in this way 

 shall have been accomplished ; when Government shall 

 have done its whole duty in regard to agricultural statistics 

 and agricultural science ; when the products of every State 

 and of every district in the Union shall have been put in 

 the way of exact and periodical ascertainment; when the 

 American soil shall have been everywhere analyzed, and 

 when those who till it shall have been everywhere instruct- 

 ed in its peculiar adaptations, and its peculiar properties, 

 and its peculiar wants ; when the whole vegetable and 

 animal and mineral kingdoms shall have been raked and 

 ransacked for the cheapest and most accessible and most 

 effective fertilizers ; when some safe and convenient mode 

 shall have been contrived (according to the late sugges- 

 tion of Lord Palmerston in England) for tm'iiing back the 

 drains and gutters and common sewers of our great cities 

 and towns upon our farms and gardens, instead of allow- 

 ing them to run waste to the sea, breeding pestilence as 

 they flow, " the country thus purifying the towns, and the 

 towns fertilizing the country ; " when the great doctrine of 



