have distinguished themselves in the service of the State and of the 

 Church. After building the college, the cure found the scholars. What 

 we ask for to-day will not be so costly. The taste for the higher education 

 is well developed, it has become part of our customs, it can stand alone. 

 The cure can now exert his influence and his earnest desire to be useful 

 in another direction. His advice will still be productive of good. Let 

 him endow our farm schools with an equally numerous band of agricultu- 

 ral students. 



If, with the assistance of those distinguished agriculturists who will 

 lend me their cooperation, I am supplied with one pupil from every parish, 

 I will engage to make a good farmer of him. But I beg the members, as 

 well as the other people of the country, to send me fit pupils. I will tell 

 you what a lad ought to be, so that time and money may not be uselessly 

 expended in obtaining pupils to instruct, who, the moment they are free 

 from the trammels of the school, will desert the interests of agriculture. 



Our proposed pupil should be from 14 to 18 years old, possessed of a 

 certain amount of education, and, in every sense of the word, a nice lad 

 {joli fj^arfon). He must be the son of a farmer and the heir presumptive of a 

 farm. 



The chief point is the judicious selection of the pupils. 



Up to the present time, the results obtained by our schools of agricul- 

 ture have rot, it must be confessed, been in due pi'oportion to the sums 

 -expended tliereou. We have not been so successful as we hoped to be, 

 because the selection of pupils has not been possible. We have been 

 satisfied with ere iting the institution, but we have not employed the pro- 

 per means of finding pupils to fill it ; and as a certain number of students 

 was necessary before the institution covild receive its grant, any lad who 

 presented himself, or could be picked up anywhere, was received, without 

 much care being exercised in the selection. This must be entirely altered. 



To repeat what I said just now : you know the steps that were taken 

 *o promote the diff"usion of the higher education. Since our success has 

 been so great in that, let us take the same means to promote the diffusion 

 of sound agricultural studies. We said to ourselves : The country needs 

 statesmen and churchmen ; and statesmen and churchmen were found 

 for it. 



In this, success was obtained in an enterprise much more arduous than 

 the enterprise I put before you to-day ; for, indeed, the task then was not 

 to search after the son of a farmer to convert him into a farmer, but, so to 

 «peak, to go to the very antipodes of things — to visit the abode of the farmer 



