Vermont farmer. [volume] (Newport, Orleans County, Vt.) 1870-1877, 1873-05-16
General 99rttuIture.
AGRICULTURAL COLLEGES AND
ORANGES.

Iowa is the banner State for Oranges, and
has also an Agricultural College whose Pres
idont and Professors endeavor to do their work
in legitimate and conscientious manner.
Tho following from an address Of President
Welch, President Of the college, before the
Patrons of Husbaudry, will commend itself to
every farmer who believes with ourselves in
working directly to the point aimed at. Mr..
Welch said
Our bond of union is the congeniality Of
like pursuits. The leading purposes Of the
Farmers College and the Farmers Grange,
though gained through different paths are
largely the same. The Grange seeks to aid
the farmer by multiplying his means Of intel
ligence, by giving him the mastery of all the
better methods and processes Of the farm, by
quickoning, intensifying and clevating all the
better elements Of his sociallife. The Grange
would secure the farmer against the torpidity
of solitude and the extortions Of monopoly
would kndle in his breast steadier zeal and
u sturdier courage would touch all the labors
Of his hands with the glow of enthusiasm
and, IN short, would do for him what skillful.
ly organized effort has already done for every
other great human industry on the round
earth All this the Grange aims to do by
means which are the most immediate and di-
rect All this the Farmers College strives
to do by another method by giving knowl-
edge, to such as will seek it, of all those
practical sciences that underle the processes
of agriculture; by training and sending forth
men who may become, as the years pass, the
leaders in the grand movement which the
Grange mas lnaugurated. 1t is in harmony
with this noble purpose that the College, in-
stead Of draining the rural districts Of their
most promising youths, and graduating them
to swell the over-crowded ranks Of the law,
or to wander in perpetual search of vacant
pulpit, sends back the farmers son to the
farm, so educated that he will re-vitalize all
its operations, and give them new and en-
during interest Such are the benign objects
which these two great enterprises are organ
lied to further. And, mark you, each seeks
to accomplish its aims by combined effort
the College, on closer and more concen-
trated plan; the Grange on wider and
grandcr scale. And what effort Of men for
the attainment Of good, or for defence against
evil has ever reached its final triumph, since
the world began, without combined effort ?
What progress, moral, social or industrial,
was ever achieved without combined effort
Combination is, in fact, the great instrument
of progress Civilization would relapse into
! barbarism without it.
And who shall dare say, in the face Of all
this marvellous advancement, this vast accu-
mutation of the results of hard thinking, this
imperative demand for skill and experience,
and Judgment and common sense, that farm
ing is a dull, stupid, humdrum business that
only stupid, humdrum people should engage
in it; that the brightest boy of the farmers
family. must be untitled for the iarHl IN
sending him to college to learn the dead Ian
guages, or crowned with u stovc-pipe hat and
dispatched to the city to engage IN the more
exalted (?) employment OF selling needles
and buttons, and tape