414 AGRICULTURE. 



failure as well as his success. To this end, he must not be in the 

 hands of quack chemists and quack physiologists in the lecture 

 halls, or those of chimerical farmers or dull teamsters in the fields. 

 Hence, the State must insist upon having, for teachers, only the 

 ablest men ; men who will teach wisely, whether it be chemistry or 

 ploughing, teach it in the best and most thorough manner, so 

 that it may become wisdom for the pupil. Such men are always 

 successful in their own sphere and calling, and can no more be had 

 for the asking than one can have the sun and stars. They must be 

 sought for and carried off by violence, and made to understand that 

 the State has a noble work for them, which she means to have 

 rightly and well done. 



To achieve this, an agricultural school must be planned, neither 

 with a lavish nor a niggardly spirit. As agriculture is especially 

 an industrial art, the manual labor practice of that art should be an 

 inevitable part of the education and discipline of the pupils. But 

 to base the operation of the school upon the plan of immediate 

 profit, in all its branches, solely, would, we conceive, cut off in a 

 great degree the largest source of profit to the country at large. 

 The pupils would leave the school either as practical farmers after a 

 single model, or they would leave it with their heads full of unsatis- 

 fied longings after theories which they had not been permitted to 

 work out. They would be destitute of that wisdom which comes 

 only from knowledge and experience combined, and would go home 

 only to fail in applying a practice suited to a different soil from 

 their own, or to indulge (at a large personal loss) theories which 

 might have been for ever settled in company with a hundred others, 

 at the smallest possible cost to the State. 



We rejoice to see the awakened zeal of the farmers of the State 

 of New- York, in this subject of agricultural education. We rejoice 

 to find a large majority of our legislature warmly seconding and 

 supporting their wishes ; and most of all, we rejoice to see a gov- 

 ernor who unceasingly urges upon our law-makers the value and 

 necessity of a great agricultural school. One of our contemporaries 

 the editor of the Working Farmer has aptly remarked that 

 WASHINGTON was our only great statesman who had " the moral 

 courage to advocate the rights of farmers. Statesmen mistake the 



