254 
STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
✓ 
Love of authority is cherished by giving to every fourth 
man an office; and love of possession by the opportunity 
afforded every man of acquiring much property with small 
means. There is land enough, and 
£: Uncle Sam is rich enough 
To give us all a farm!” 
Activity and energy are also stimulated by the unbounded 
advantage, pecuniary, social and political, which may come of 
their exercise. 
Here, then, we have the whole country in full view before 
us—its physical condition, its people, its government. But 
w T e are not yet prepared to properly appreciate the educa¬ 
tional demands of the age and race, until we have first glanced 
at the relation we sustain to other countries. 
I remember being struck, when a boy, with the remarkable 
smallness and paucity of the light spots on the social chart of 
the wmrld. And so to-day the spectacle of the nations is a 
sad one. Still, it may be well for us to ,dwell for a moment 
upon the great pagan world, wfith its large proportion of the 
human race still sitting in the darkness of superstition and 
idolatry—upon the barbaric tribes of Southern Asia, North 
Africa, and the half-civilized millions of China, Japan and 
South America — upon the millions also, of so-called civilized 
Europe; the blind, sensuous followers of the Prophet; the 
ignorant, priest-ridden multitudes of Portugal, Spain and 
Italy—the two former stagnant and even in process of decay; 
the last named, though itself only a remnant of a decayed 
nation, and scarcely less degraded in its condition, yet more 
hopeful than they, and just now renewing her oft-repeated 
struggle for a more worthy existence, under the lead of the 
noble patriot Garibaldi (whom may God help!)—upon the 
millions of serfs that toil in Russian fields; the isolated and 
rude inhabitants of the frigid north; and even the poor toil- 
oppressed, uneducated multitudes of enlightened Germany, 
France and England. 
Are they not a mournful subject for contemplation—these 
hundreds of poor, groping, stumbling, decrepit peoples that 
