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Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1872
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233 ited Eochester a few weeks since, I expressed my admiration of the pleasant home and floral surrounding of one of our leading horticulturists. I was struck by the reply: "We must spend the greater part of our lives in business, therefore, to enjoy life, we must make our business as pleasant as possible." This saying is worthy of all acceptation, but one that we Americans, in our haste to get riches, woefully neglect. Our homes go unpainted, our lawns unshorn, our orchards and ornamental trees unplanted, that a few more acres of corn or wheat may be sown; and our wives, our children and ourselves, finding no attraction in bare acres and an unsheltered homestead, looklongingly even to the petty excitement and gossiping scandals of the village as a relief from the ignorance and ennui of the farm. Yet God made the country and man made fhe town; and, doubtless, to the truly educated, the book of nature that country life offers us is more attractive than the more monotonous pages of human life. Man may be a proper study of mankind, but not, except in his higher phases, a very profitable or improving one; and the home life of the farm house, vivified, beautified and idealized by rural taste, is the fortress of the social and political virtues that purify society and make the firm basis of our republican democracy. —25
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