In the plan indicated, I have, throughout, assumed the disposition of

the farmers to educate themselves
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.


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