ILLINOIS DAIBYMEK'S ASSOCIATION. 55 



elation with our fellows. Many a man has made himself decidedly intelli- 

 gent and well-informed by a prudent appropriation of the bits thus brought 

 in his way; and especially does this association give us the smoothness of 

 speech and manners so essential to anything like happy liviDg with those 

 about us. The foundryman appreciates the value of this principle when he 

 puts his rough castings into his mining machine and rolls and tumbles them 

 upon each other until they are cleaned and even polished. Society is a great 

 milling machine and we are tumbled about and against each other until 

 some of the angles of prejudice and jagged projections of our unreasoning 

 likes and dislikes are knocked o:ff. l!^ow no man, can be deprived of the 

 kind of education just referred to without material detriment and the man 

 who has least of it should have more of some other means of getting inform- 

 ation and refinement. The farmer is necessarily isolated and while in a 

 moral point of view he may be the gainer, he is deprived of much of the so- 

 cial instruction and refining influences received by our living in a village or 

 city. Khali he be content to suffer the resulting deterioration and even add 

 to it by giving himself— I was about to say soul and body— to more physical 

 labor or shall he set intelligently about finding some means of avoiding 

 such a result ? 



I think he has not far to look. Next to meeting men is to read their 

 thoughts. If he cannot hear the lecture he can read it the next morning ; 

 and this meeting of men by proxy has its advantages over the actual contact. 

 There will be less ill-advised talk between the book and the reader, more 

 wisdom, less froth but more wine. He will meet men only at their best. In 

 short it seems to me there is nothing can so certainly or powerfully counter- 

 act the undesirable tendencies of the farmer's business as a good library— 

 whether it be of ten or ten hundred volumes ; and a good library is simply a 

 part of good literature ; and by good literature I do not mean poetical moon- 

 shine, rose water sentiment, a symphony of sighs nor mere historical dry 

 bones and scientific cobblestones. 



Literature is the highest thoughts of the greatest minds. It is the ex- 

 pressed wisdom of the wisest, the condensed shrewdness of the wittiest, the 

 purest tones of the sweetest singers. Some one has said it is "the immor- 

 tality of sneech." It contains all the ascertained facts of science, the crys- 

 talized wisdom of history, the gentler and more sympathetic things of indi- 

 vidual life in its biography, all of everyday life in its fiction, the purest 

 thoughts of the most refined souls in its ethics, the wisdom, the glory and 

 the inspiration from beyond the "azure arched way" in its poetry. Its field 

 is so large that each man may find matter to his taste and it can 

 but be thatsuch occupation willtend more to build up true manhood 

 and womanhood than absorption in the details of business. Not 

 that any should ignore the practical things of the factory, the farm 

 the parlor, or the kitchen but that they should not have entire control 

 of existence. There are bodies to clothe, stomachs to feed, and children to 

 care for; but there are also souls to develop and co»ver with white garments 

 of truth, noble hopes to feed and thought children to nourish; and doing the 

 latter three will lend steadiness of purpose the better to attend to the three 

 former. An indulged taste for good reading gives worthy thoughts, inspires 



