"The great difficulty with students of agriculture, who might care to come to the Scientific School, is the expense of living in Cambridge. If some farmer at a distance of three or four miles from college, where rents for rooms are low, would open a boarding-house for students of agriculture in the Scientific School, where the care of a kitchen garden and some stock might be intrusted to them, and where a farmer's plain table might be spread at the price at which laborers would be received, we might hope that our facilities would be taken advantage of on a larger scale. As it is, but few, comparatively, among our students, come to qualify themselves for farming."
I should, however, consider the arrangements proposed as temporary, and finally to be abandoned or made permanent, as experience should dictate.
It may be said, I think, without disparagement to the many distinguished and disinterested men who have labored for the advancement of agriculture, that the operations of the government and of the state and county societies have no plan or system by which, as a whole, they are guided. The county societies have been and are the chief means of influence and progress; but they have no power which can be systematically applied; their movements are variable, and their annual exhibitions do not always indicate the condition of agriculture in the districts represented. They have become, to a certain extent, localized in the vicinity of the towns where the fairs are held; and yet they do not possess the vigor which institutions positively local would enjoy.
The town clubs hold annual fairs; and these fairs should be made tributary, in their products and in the interest they excite, to the county fairs. Let the town fairs be held as early in the season as practicable, and then let each town send to the county fairs its first-class premium articles as the contributions of the local society, as well as of the individual producers. Thus a healthful and generous rivalry would be stirred up between the towns of a county as well as among the citizens of each town; and a county exhibition upon the plan suggested would represent at one view the general condition of agriculture in the vicinity. No one can pretend that this is accomplished by the present arrangements. Moreover, the county society, in its management and in its annual exhibitions, would possess an importance which it had not before enjoyed. As each town would be represented by the products of the dairy, the herd, and the field, so it would be represented by its men; and the annual fair of the county would be a truthful and complete exposition of its industrial standing and power.
Out of a system thus broad, popular, and strong, an agricultural college will certainly spring, if such an institution shall be needed. But is it likely that in a country where the land is divided, and the number of farmers is great, the majority will ever be educated in colleges, and upon strict scientific principles? I am ready to answer that such an expectation seems to me a mere delusion. The great body of young farmers must be educated by the example and practices of their elders, by their own efforts at individual and mutual improvement, and by the influence of agricultural journals, books, lecturers, and the example of thoroughly educated men. And, as thoroughly educated men, lecturers, journals, and books of a proper character, cannot be furnished without the aid of scientific schools and thorough culture, the farmers, as a body, are interested in the establishment of all institutions of learning which promise to advance any number of men, however small, in the mysteries of the profession; but, when we design a system of education for a class, common wisdom requires us to contemplate its influence upon each individual. The influence of a single college in any state, or in each state of this Union, would be exceedingly limited; but local societies and travelling lecturers could make an appreciable impression in a year upon the agricultural population of any state, and in New England the interest in the subject is such that there is no difficulty in founding town clubs, and making them at once the agents of the government and the schools for the people.
In the plan indicated, I have, throughout, assumed the disposition of the farmers to educate themselves. This assumption implies a certain degree of education already attained; for a consciousness of the necessity of education is only developed by culture, learning, and reflection. Such being the admitted fact, it remains that the farmers themselves ought at once to institute such means of self-improvement as are at their command. They are, in nearly every state of this Union, a majority of the voters, and the controlling force of society and the government; but I do not from these facts infer the propriety of a reliance on their part upon the powers which they may thus direct. However wisely said, when first said, it is not wise to "look to the government for too much;" and there can be no reasonable doubt of the ability of the farmers to institute and perfect such measures of self-education as are at present needed. But the spirit in which they enter upon this work must be broad, comprehensive, catholic. They will find something, I hope, of example, something of motive, something of power, in their experience as friends and supporters of our system of common school education; and something of all these, I trust, in the facts that this system is kept in motion by the self-imposed taxation of the whole people; that all individuals and classes of men, forgetting their differences of opinion in politics and religion, rally to its support, as being in itself a safe basis on which may be built whatever structures men of wisdom and virtue and piety may desire to erect, whether they labor first and chiefly for the world that is, or for that which is to come.
FOOTNOTE:
[10] Hon. George S. Hillard.