38 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Our attention will now be directed, towards the work of the 

 schools. This is of prime importance, because here are to be 

 trained the men who will be influential in determining the status 

 of agriculture. The standing of any profession or business de- 

 pends not so much upon the kind of work performed as upon the 

 character and quality of the men engaged in it, provided, of course, 

 that the work is honorable. If the social horizon of the tiller of 

 the soil is narrow, it is not because he digs in Mother Earth, but 

 is in jjart because of his inability to reach out to larger social 

 and intellectual opportunities. While it is not to be expected 

 that all the followers of any calling shall stand in the forefront 

 of social and intellectual life, it is certainly true that if agri- 

 culture is to maintain its proper dignity and influence among the 

 world's great industries, politically and socially, it must number 

 among its followers men of the same intellectual ability and 

 wide range of vision that are found in other callings. 



Farmers have often complained that lawyers have chiefly legis- 

 lated for them, but if this is true it is partly because they have 

 not been shown their ability to determine their own political and 

 social status. The conditions that make for supremacy in human 

 society are not nullified or reversed as a favor to the farmer. At 

 the same time that we recognize this fact we must admit another 

 of equal importance, viz. : that the interests of agriculture, 

 whether in legislation or in business and social conflicts, are 

 safest in the hands of its own followers who are qualified by 

 education and experience successfully to compete with opposing 

 interests. For these reasons, then, we are anxious that the train- 

 ing of the schools shall render the best possible service to agricult- 

 ure in the preparation of its leaders. 



In order that this shall be accomplished, we must give place 

 to a conservatism which recognizes the value of past experience 

 in the means and methods of imparting a sound education. 



When the land-grant colleges were first organized, a popular 

 notion pi-evailed that an entirely new order of education was to be 

 established — tliat the matter and manner of the classical college 

 were to be replaced by other subjects and other methods. The 

 young man was to be trained to do rather than to think. The 

 introduction into the curricula of these schools of such subjects 

 as the modern languages, literature, and metaphysics, or even 

 extended instruction in the sciences, was resented by many as 



