ADDRESS. 31 



posed to progress and to knowledge, for that part was unnat- 

 ural and opposed to itself, for progress is the law of life, and 

 to be opposed to a rational progress is in eftect to die and be 

 forgotten. 



If we did not learn the best modes of farming when we 

 were young, it was because there were then no facilities for 

 doing so. We did the best we could and used all the light 

 we had. But now when we have these facilities, we will not 

 say to our children," " We did so and so, and you may go and 

 do likewise !" No ! Rather let us tell them to study and 

 comprehend the age in which they live. Tell them they are 

 expected to do better than their fathers did if they can, and 

 to imitate them only when they can no longer improve upon 

 them. Tell them to educate themselves for farming as a pro- 

 fession. Tell them the wq^-ld Vill instinctively award its 

 honors, its dignities and its power, not merely to those who 

 are educated for the law, for divinity, for medicine, for teach- 

 ing, or for the counting-room, but to those who are educated 

 for their occupation. Tell them the professions, technically 

 so called, have hitherto exerted an almost unbounded influ- 

 ence on mankind, only because they have done so much of 

 the thinking for the world, have brought so large a share of 

 intellect to bear on the progress of the race. For these rea- 

 sons the world has bowed in reverence to their superiority of 

 intellect, and has given a prominence, not to* law, medicine or 

 divinity, but to that intellectual culture which gives to life its 

 grace, its harmony and its beauty, and which they may ac- 

 quire as well as others. Tell them that science, stooping 

 from its proud flight among the clouds and the stars, has shed 

 its genial light around them and above. Tell them to learn 

 of nature ; to seek knowledge from the right hand and the 

 left, and though to attempt to learn all her laws and observe 

 all her miracles may seem as hopeless as^ to try to gather to- 

 gether the pebbles on the shore of the sea, yet in the enlarge- 

 ment and elevation of mind which it will produce, every ob- 

 ject will be clothed with the perfection and beauty which it 

 had when it came from the hand of God ! 



