No. 4.J RURAL PROGRESS. 155 



cause, — as well as to prepare him to follow some vocation. 

 There are teachers in this State — I know of one in particu- 

 lar, in one of our rural towns, who, when a bright boy went 

 to him to consult him about going to the Agricultural Col- 

 lege at Amherst, said, "Do you want to be a farmer?" 

 The boy did not know. " Well," said the teacher, " if you 

 do, why, then, go up to Amherst ; but if you are not sure, 

 I would advise you to go somewhere else," naming two or 

 three old-line colleges. It is my feeling that the majority 

 of the teachers in the State would have g-iven the same ad- 

 vice. Now, the teachers may not be altogether to blame, 

 for they may be uninformed as to what we are doing at 

 Amherst, and therefore one of our first duties must be to set 

 them right, — to enlighten them ; and in this work we must 

 enlist not only the aid of this Board, but particularly of 

 the Board of Education. We aim to teach the bovs who so 

 to Amherst, first, to be good and useful citizens, to do their 

 part in society ; then we train them along vocational lines. 

 As a result of this training, more than half of our graduates 

 are now engaged in agriculture or allied pursuits. So prac- 

 tical and useful has been the training at Amherst, that the 

 graduates are soon settled in some pursuit, nearly every 

 man in the last graduating class being placed before he 

 graduated. 



I want to say, further, that we are drawing the larger 

 part of our students from the city and the town, and not 

 from the farm ; and I, for one, do not object to it, — I think 

 it is a good sign. We must rememlier that the college was 

 established for the whole people, and not for any particular 

 class ; and I like to see boys come from Brockton, Natick, 

 Worcester and Boston. For generations we have sent our 

 boys from the farm to Boston and Worcester, and now 1 

 like to see Boston and Worcester and other cities reciprocate 

 by sending their boys to Amherst to be educated at our 

 Agricultural College ; and when we get them there, we turn 

 many of them to country pursuits and country life. It is a 

 kind of reciprocity which I believe in encouraging, and 

 which the college is helping along. This Board and the 

 Board of Education, and particularly the public school 



