160 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



if either were a veritable El Dorado? Why is every avenue of 

 business life crowded with middle men, commercial travellers, and 

 non-producers of every description, while in every State farms 

 are abandoned or worked under protest ? I have cut the following 

 paragraph from a newspaper of last December : 



" In the rural districts in Wayne Count}^ New York, there are 

 no less than four hundred empty houses. It is a lamentable fact 

 that the rural population of Wa^-ne County is slowly drifting into 

 the larger towns and cities, while many are going West in search 

 of cheaper homes or fortunes. The town of Sodus alone has over 

 fift3' deserted houses, and Huron has thirty or more." 



Without attempting to give all the causes for such a state of 

 affairs, to a certain extent we may fix the responsibility upon our 

 common schools, since they are organized, or have been until 

 recently, for turning out scholars who are bound to be non- 

 producers until they are educated differently. Our pupils apply 

 for such positions as our schools fit pupils for. If nine-tenths of 

 them aim to be traders, or actually become such, it is because our 

 schools have fitted them better to be traders than anything else. 

 If a farmer's boy becomes proficient in arithmetic, no one of all 

 concerned considers such proficiency as an important factor in 

 making the boy a superior farmer, but rather as evidence that he 

 is destined by nature and education to a higher sphere of action 

 than farming. His education, all the way through school, is of 

 such a nature that its connection with farming is obscure, while 

 its connection with the store, the oflSce, or the agency is clear, 

 and his aspiration to be a business man, a genteel trader, a book- 

 keeper, or something above a farmer (as he thinks), is exactly in 

 line with his education. In fact, with the farmer's boy, getting an 

 education has come to be almost synonymous with getting away 

 from the farm, since that is what really comes to pass. We 

 estimate the influence of our schools bj' what the pupils have been 

 and have done during a long term of ^ears. Some studies alienate 

 scholars from the cultivation of the soil and from nature gener- 

 ally, more than others. Where is the scholar who, once having 

 entered upon the study of Latin, so full of halos, mirages, and 

 expectations to the tyro, ever thought for a moment of earning 

 his living by horticulture or any kind of farm work ? Though the 

 Georgics and Bucolics of Virgil describe the felicities of farming 

 in the choicest Latin, they never influenced one student in ten 



