4<D NEW HAMPSHIRE AGRICULTURE. 



Mr. H. — " If the president was right, you can easily post 

 yourself on that branch of farming. If you will pardon my 

 curiosity, I will ask what did your great diploma cost you ?" 



Graduate. — "I do n't quite like to say. I fear from your 

 questions that you think it covers only about half of what it 

 ought to, and that, like a fifty cent silver dollar, it is worth but 

 half of what it claims to be. However, I will answer your 

 question, and say that my degree of Bachelor of Science cost me 

 three years' study and about one thousand dollars." 



Mr. H. — " Go and study two or three years more with some 

 intelligent, practical farmer who understands his business. If, 

 at the end of that time, you see fit to return to me, with a cer- 

 tificate from him, in two lines, that you have come to know less 

 than you thought you did, and have become a middling good 

 farmer, I '11 hire you." 



If the wings of the young " diplomatist " were plucked a lit- 

 tle by this interview, it was far less his fault than that of his 

 teachers. Our chairman doubtless recognized this fact, and 

 would have pardoned him had he ventured to say of them, what 

 the great German statesman has recently said of the landless 

 rulers of his country, " Each minister [professor] ought to be put 

 on a farm and forced to subsist on the products thereof. Then 

 would farming be better cared for." 1 



In the general study of the great laws which govern indus- 

 trial processes, the present trend of thought is toward practi- 

 cality. Many of the principles of electricity were well known 

 an hundred years ago, but that knowledge benefited mankind 

 but little. Now that this most subtle and powerful of all known 

 agencies has been tamed and harnessed to the rail car and the 

 mill wheel, its value has become incalculable. And, when all 

 the hidden forces of nature applicable to agriculture shall have 

 been made available, the results of our labors will have been 

 enlarged and our welfare correspondingly advanced. 



John Lord has somewhere said that, during the reign of the 

 Caesars and their successors, great elevating and depressing 

 forces were constantly active, the latter of which eventually 

 prevailed and rendered the ruin of the empire as complete as it 



» Boston Daily Advertiser, June 10, 1895, p. 1. 



