2 52 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



I am conscious that I have used a great deal of time in order to say to 

 the young man that if you want a sound education, if you want an adu- 

 cation that will fit you for a useful life, if you want an education worthy 

 of the mental capacity of an Edison or a Pasteur, you can find it in the 

 course in agriculture. If it will not serve your purpose in after life, do 

 not take it. There are plenty of other courses that will give you as 

 good a training. The variety of courses in the State Universities is 

 such as to suit the most fastidious. But if you are interested in the 

 problems underlying agriculture, if your artistic instinct leads you to 

 prefer producing living pulsating models of plants and animals, instead 

 of reproducing their counterfeit on canvas, if your scientific bent is 

 toward organic rather than metallurgic chemistry, for botany rather 

 than physics, if your business ability lies in trading in stock rather than 

 in trading in stocks, if your love for excitement is better satisfied in 

 the shrow ring than in the courtroom, you need not avoid a course in ag- 

 riculture, because it lacks a training worthy of the highest mind. The 

 dean of your general faculty years ago said that the digestive juices 

 of education is interest. The fact that almost without exception those 

 K^ho have studied agriculture have been interested, not to say enthu- 

 siastic, has, in no small measure, added to their success. 



But granting all this, after the education is acquired, will it produce 

 bread and meat, and if so, is it sordid? Does it present an opportunity 

 for a career, or will the possessors remain hewers of wood and drawers 

 of water? 



This is just as good a place as any to behead once more that hydra- 

 headed monster, which asserts that agriculturtal colleges educate boys 

 away from the farm. I happen to have the statistics concerning the 

 alumni of a college of agriculture and of its ex-students since 1892. 

 These statistics concern 399 young men who have spent more or less 

 time in studying agriculture. The occupation of sixty is unknown,. 

 One hundred and seventy-four are farmers, gradeners, and dairymen, 

 forty-eight are creamery operators, butter and cheese makers, eight are 

 farm superintendents or employes, twenty-eight are employees of col- 



