1 v Address. 



mente. What Mr. Motley says of the Dutch Republic in its palmiest days 

 is applicable to ours. 



" In proportion to their nambers they were more productive of wealth 

 than any other nation then existing. An excellent reason why the people 

 were so well governed, so productive, and so enterprising, was the simple 

 fact that they were an educated people." Now we claim to be an educated 

 nation, but we cannot really become so until all professions and trades, not 

 merely one or two or three, are represented by youth educated in all the 

 special learning applicable thereunto, and each have a share and share 

 alike in the sciences which underlie all business and callings. 



The view that I present of the opportunity of the New England farmer 

 is no wise chimerical. Scientific agriculture is hardly of half a century's 

 growth, and in that time it has renovated nearly the whole of Europe. 

 Agricultural schools have existed in the Old country more that lifty years, 

 and under the new systems of husbandry propagated by their influences, 

 profits have increased from 500 to 1000 per cent. Great enterprises like 

 the cultivation of beets for sugar in France, and its extension to Russia, 

 through the means of educated agriculturists, imported for that purpose 

 from the former country, have been fostered by the appropriate scientific 

 knowledge, and the value of arable lands has increased two and three fold. 

 In the little kingdom of Hesse, which, during our revolution, was so poor 

 that its mercenary ruler sold his subjects to England as instruments of ou r 

 attempted subjugation, land under the treatment of improved husbandry 

 has risen in value three hundred per cent. But we need only to look 

 around among ourselves to see what education in farming has done and is 

 doing. We have been educated by these agricultural societies, by the 

 farmers' clubs, by the newspapers, and every one of you who is taking up 

 a speciality, such as breeding stock, raising fruit, or sending milk to the 

 cities, is in a process of education, because it rouses you to study all the 

 departments connected with your labors, and to apply all your energies to 

 make the resources of your farm meet the demands for the article you raise 

 or sell. But we all regret that in our youth, when we were pursuing our 

 avocations on the farm, we had not the opportunity of studying the sciences 

 so intimately connected with our pursuits, that we might now have the 

 knowledge through whose application we could make our farms produce 

 two-fold more than they do, the pleasure which the prosecution of any 

 undertaking whose rationale we understand always bestows, and the perse- 

 verance and method which are only given by precepts and principles grouded 



