st a spirit of discovery and improvement." In this recommendation
the example of the English Board of Agriculture and the influence of his
friend Arthur Young are discernible. It would have been well for the
country if Congress had heeded the advice, but public opinion was not
then educated to the need of such a step and almost a century passed
before anything of much importance was done by the national government
to improve the state of American agriculture.

In farming as in politics Washington was no standpatter. Notwithstanding
many discouragements, he could not be kept from trying new things, and
he furnished his farms with every kind of improved tool and implement
calculated to do better work. At his death he owned not only threshing
machines and a Dutch fan, but a wheat drill, a corn drill, a machine for
gathering clover seed and another for raking up wheat. Yet most of his
countrymen remained content to drop corn by hand, to broadcast their
wheat, to tread out their grain and otherwise to follow methods as old
as the days of Abel for at least another half century.

He was the first American conservationist. He realized that man owes a
duty to the future just as he owes a debt to the past. He deplored the
already developing policy of robber exploitation by which our soil and
forests have been despoiled, for he foresaw the bitter fruits which such
a policy must produce, and indeed was already producing on the fields of
Virginia. He was no misanthropic cynic to exclaim, "What has posterity
ever done for us that we should concern ourselves for posterity?" His
care for the lands of Mount Vernon was evidence of the God-given trait
imbedded in the best of men to transmit unimpaired to future generations
what has been handed down to them.

His agricultural career has its lessons for us, even though we should
not do well to follow some of his methods. The lessons lie rather in his
conception of farming as an honorable occupation capable of being put on
a better and more scientific basis by the application of brains and
intelligence; in his open-minded and progressive seeking after better
ways. Many of his experiments failed, it is true, but for his time he
was a great Farmer, just as he was a great Patriot, Soldier and
Statesman. Patient, hard-working, methodical, willing to sacrifice his
own interests to those of the general good, he was one of those men who
have helped raise mankind from the level of the brute and his