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New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9105, 13 July 1888, Page 5

If there is one thing beyond all others that should be driven home to the understandings and the hearts of our people, it is the paramount duty of developing a taste for agricultural and other rural pursuits. Our urban tastes and our congestion of population in the ; cities are an unnatural , thing, and utterly alien to all correct ideas of colonisation; and the greatest benefactor of this colony would be the man who could make it a popular, a fashionable, an attractive thing to go live in the country, and feel a pride and a happiness in exercising mind as well as body in drawing forth from it the teeming riches with which it has been :10 lavishly gifted by the hand of Nature.* We believe that the object might be attained if agriculture and education were wedded together ; and 'as the days when the agriculturist . was necessarily a clown have passed sway, and successful agriculture now requires the knowledge and resources of science as much as any other | : calling in life, —indeed more than many because of the fierceness of the competition of our day,there is every reason to hope that the time is not distant when " rustic" will no longer be synonymous with boorish or stupid ; and when rural life will be as promotive of intellectual development, and culture and refinement, as life in-the cities lias been. ' Certain it is that the countries that are to hold their own in the great coming struggle of competition in production are girding themselves for the contest by education; and if we mean to hold our own in that pursuit which par excellence should be the principal calling of a virgin country like our own, we must do the same. It is therefore that we direct particular attention to * mi interesting extract in another column from an article in the * Fortnightly He view of May last, showing the attention? that is given on the Continent, and especially in Denmark, to diffuse a knowledge of agricultural science among the peasants, and even the gentry of the country." There practical farming is, we see, the business of two-thirds of the people ; there are three times ' as many people in the country as in the towns striking contrast to the state of things in our young country with our millions of acres of fertile and unused lands, and where our urban population is larger than our* rural; there the prosperous rustic has • no ■ desire ! to migrate to the towns ; and "the landed gentry, with exceedingly few exceptions, are keen and practical farmers themselves, bringing education, study, and the experience of generations tobear upon a question that interests them vitally and we are told that " the Danes seem to have laudably determined to compete with the virgin soil and boundless acreage of new countries like America by raising their own farthing methods to the highest scientific level.' And how is this to be done ? and how has this taste, this enthusiasm, been diffused through noble and peasant alike ? "Agricultural' colleges are numerous ''and well-attended, Professors of agricultural chemistry, and of the. science of husbandry are active as lecturers, busy in the wide diffusion of their knowledge." And we are further told that " after 1870 the Agricultural Societies went so far as to send instructors from farm to farm to teach the people, and their instructions • were gratefully welcomed." Can we ♦. wonder that the peasants refuse to be "drawn to the towns 1 Can we wonder "iWiat the gentry feel delight and pride jn a calling that is ennobled so by intellectual effort, so wedded to education and culture ? And turning to the reference to France, we read that the Minister of Agriculture, dealing with the evils "of French agriculture, calls the " maladie" " routine and ignorance" and declares that the only remedy is instruction ; and " advocates the universal establishment, even in primary schools, of a course of preliminary study bearing' on- the question, as preparatory to that offered in the Agricultural Colleges, which he desires to be multiplied and, enlarged." These are the methods by which agriculture is being raised to the proud position which it should occupy, in countries that have awaked to its importance. And in this country of ours, where nature points to agriculture as the calling of all others that for which our country is adapted, we have not only done nothing to inspire a taste for agricultural pursuits, but the whole system of our education tends to wean even the children of our rural settlers from the soil 5 and the son of a farmer has his highest ambition in obtaining some " genteel" occupation in the city, at quill-driving in some one or another of its varied forms being taught to regard the calling of a farmer as the business only of an illiterate clown. This comes of our listening to the cry of the blundering old victims of "routine and ignorance," as the French Minister designates them, and who tell us that by their methods "fanning will not pay ;" and from our failing to associate education and culture and science with the noble calling of agriculturea calling which affords as fine a field for intellectual development and for refinement of life and habits Sas any in the whole range of human industry, and which has only fallen into disrepute from the blunduring and unintelligent "routine and ignorance" which unfortunately with us as elsewhere has been the maladio of agricultural life.