150 
Agricultural Worth lies. 
men — such, as Handley, R. Clive, Estcourt, Childers, and Philip 
Pusey — were ready to lend their aid ; but it required two such 
leaders as Lord Spencer and the Duke of Richmond to bring 
together the memorable gathering that assembled at the Free- 
masons' Tavern on May 9, 1838, to establish the English 
Agricultural Society. As a matter of course, Lord Spencer was 
called to the chair, and set forth the object of the meetiug with- 
out any attempt at rhetorical display, urging upon those around 
him the necessity there was for the wider and more general dif- 
fusion of agricultural knowledge, and pointing out how this might 
be effected by the establishment of a great and powerful society 
combining practice with science — an expression which is per- 
petuated in the Society's motto. He also pointed out, in plain 
and forcible language, the necessity for excluding politics from 
the Society's operations, and thus laid down the governing 
principles which have regulated its proceedings, ensured its 
prosperity, and guided to practical usefulness the scientific 
operations which it has initiated or encouraged. 
It is unnecessary to follow Lord Spencer through the various 
stages of his work as the first President of the English Agri- 
cultural Society. His labours were constant and unremitting, 
and at the General Meeting held in the following December, 
the "marked thanks" of the Society were voted to him for his 
eminent services. At the first Annual Meeting, in May, 1839, 
his lordship was in a position to announce that 1,100 members 
had been enrolled, and that the invested capital amounted to 
3,000/., in addition to 1,196/. in the bankers' hands. Two 
months later he had the satisfaction of attending the first 
Country Meeting, held at Oxford, and of witnessing the extra- 
ordinary excitement which that event occasioned^- and the 
enthusiasm manifested at the dinner in the quadrangle of 
Queen's College. It was at this dinner that Daniel Webster, 
the American orator and statesman, responding most eloquently 
to the toast of " Distinguished Strangers," uttered the memor- 
able aphorism : " Agriculture feeds us : to a great degree it 
clothes us : without it we could not have manufactures, and we 
should not have commerce. These all stand together ; but they 
stand together like pillars in a cluster, the largest in the centre 
— and that largest is Agriculture." 
At Cambridge in 1840, Liverpool in 1841, Bristol in 1842, 
and Derby in 1 843, Lord Spencer participated actively in the 
proceedings. In 1844, when the Country Meeting was held at 
Southampton, he again occupied the Presidential Chair, and in 
the same year gave his valuable co-operation in the establish- 
ment of the Etojal Agricultural College at Cirencester. At the 
