Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. lr>7 
still greater remove from the farmers who sustain them, in town or 
county centers. These schools, in strict dependence through iheir 
several grades, and in constant interchange, are a primary means 
by which the farmer should organize himself and family, socially 
and intellectually, into the community. It will cost time, effort, 
enterprise, money, but it will amply repay all. It is a form of ac¬ 
tion truly economic, as it demands immediate expenditure in behalf 
of remote but large returns. The fool will stumble at this first ob¬ 
stacle in his path, and fall, and there will be none to pick him up. 
Let the farmer hide himself away in the country, hide away his 
family, cut off his school from its direct dependence on those above 
it, and a boorish, uncivilized temper will take possession of him 
and his household, hostile to all social progress. This is the nat¬ 
ural tendency of things, and farmers need unusual self-assertion 
and enterprise to counteract them. They need constantly to be 
reminded that a school separated from its natural, living connec¬ 
tions with those above it, neither feeding them nor being fed by 
them, is of little educational value, and destitute of social force. 
Here, I think, I may rightly urge a point more immediate to my 
own work. If the University is to exert the influence it ought, its 
power must be felt, descending through every grade of instruction 
to the most primary. The brain-power of any class will ultimate¬ 
ly be its social and political power, and if farmers are fully to win 
and firmly hold what belongs to them, it must be by virtue of 
many and accessible paths upwards into every grade of knowledge. 
I think we mistake at this point, and are ready to feel that a high 
school, a normal school, a university, are not direct educational 
forces except to those who attend on them. Knowledge, social in¬ 
fluences, are much more subtle and penetrative than this opinion 
implies. A community, with whom education commences well in 
its primary forms, and passes up by unbroken gradations to the 
liberal training of the university, acquires a general intelligence, 
sagacity and brain-power which every one of its members is sure to 
feel, and of which every one of them is made a large partaker. 
Such a community is transparent, the light of ideas penetrates 
everywhere. 
Suggestions, thoughts, theories, pass from man to man, and 
those who have enjoyed little school education become none the 
less educated. The bright minds, like stalactites in a cave when 
