science be brought to bear on those arts. It meant to provide for the education of men who could develop them and improve them. Merely to add, to the millions now intelligently practising these arts, a few more intelligent farmers or artisans each year, would be a wretchedly inadequate return for these endowments. The places for imparting the simple, usual practical education for agricultural and mechanical pursuits are the millions of farms and workshops in the country. Nowhere else can such practical knowledge be afforded so cheaply or so effectively.
The national institutions for education should, indeed, have farms and workshops; but the foremost object of these should be, not to afford simple employment to young men, but to give them, in connection with their studies in the sciences, what may be called laboratories, where they can see science applied in as practical a manner as possible—laboratories, whether field or shop, where they can see sciences limited by the necessities of practice. It cannot be too much insisted upon that the main object of these institutions should be to send out men, with minds trained by observation and experiment, to develop the various agricultural and other industries, and to improve them, and not simply to increase, by an almost infinitesimal fraction, the number of those engaged in the usual industries pursued with a little more intelligence, in the usual way.
But it is said that scientific and industrial education does not better agriculture. Does it not? Of all assertions this is the most fearful indictment against the most extended field of human thought and work. If this be true, then is agriculture the only industrial pursuit unworthy of a human being; for this assertion would not be made against any other branch of human industry. But it is not true. The whole history of agriculture shows exactly the reverse of this. Look at those wonderful "Tables in Comparative Sociology," by Herbert Spencer, just issued, and study there the progress of agriculture and other industries from their rudest beginnings, and you see that skill in observation and reasoning on observation have been steadily improving agriculture, at the same time that they have improved other industries.
But grant that the number of students devoted wholly to agriculture is small, it is not these alone whose education tells upon agriculture. Even a partial course in it has great value. It was the remark of a very distinguished statesman of this Commonwealth—one who occupied this desk as Speaker, yonder chamber as Governor, and who received the suffrages of many of his countrymen for the highest office in their gift—that the main thing in agricultural education is to do something to make agricultural pursuits attractive. His view is that whereas in England every man longs to obtain a competency to enable him to retire from the city, here men seek to escape from the country to the city; and that we should attempt to bring about a change of
