Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/124

Rh what experiments have been already tried with profit, what with failure. He should keep his eye open to the agriculture of mankind; ever on the look-out for new animals, plants, roots, seeds, scions, and better varieties of the old stock; for richer fertilizers of the soil—no islands of guano too remote for him to think upon; for superior modes of tillage; and more effective tools, whereby man could do more human work with less human toil. He would naturally confer with other farmers about him and all round the world, men of science or of practice, analyzing soils, enriching farms, greatening the crops. He would stimulate his townsmen to think about their work, and to create new use and new beauty on their estates. He need not be very anxious that all should think just as their fathers had done, or plough and shovel with instruments of the old pattern.

But what if he were ignorant and knew no more than others about him, and was yet called "the Honourable Agricultural Superintendent," "the Reverend Professor of Farming," and had been "ordained with ancient ceremomies!" It is plain he could not teach what he did not know. If he knew only the theory, not also the practice, he would be only a half teacher.

What if he was lazy, and would not learn? or bigoted, and stuck in some old form of agriculture, and would never depart from it—the Hebrew, from the time when there was no blacksmith in Israel, and men filed them ploughshares out of lumps of cold iron? or the Catholic form, in the days of Gregory VII., or Innocent III.? or the Reformed agriculture, from Luther's and Calvin's time? or the Puritanic, from the age of New England Cotton and Davenport? What if he took some ancient heathen author, Cato, Varro, Virgil, or Columella, as an infallible guide, and insisted that no crop, however seemingly excellent, could be good for anything unless won from the earth in that old-fashioned way; or declared that no blessing would fall upon a man's field unless he were a professing follower of Elias the Tishbite, and broke up ground with a team not less than four and twenty oxen strong!

What if he were perverse and cowardly, and saw the great errors in the common mode of farming—the theory wrong, the practice imperfect— and knew how to correct