the program, where the exercise is repeated. Many a farmer brings seed ears, evidently for the purpose of showing that he, too, knows. The lecture makes him modest, so that, instead of parading his seed ears, he leaves them in the seat or carries them out for feed to his team.

Hardly any speech could too favorably characterize the usefulness of this school. I know of no other industrial education of similar compass so successful. Nearly all graduates settle upon farms, not from necessity, but from preference. Their farming is profitable, their lives happy, their culture high and their citizenship exemplary. From most of the branches taught, women may profit as well as men. Dairying, horticulture and home economics they find peculiarly to their taste. The scope of women's self-help chances is much enlarged. General agriculture and stock rearing are not beyond women's powers, for many women are getting rich at them. Best of all, men and women graduating from the school become agricultural exemplars and

apostles. Each is for the whole community a center of light and inspiration.

Gigantic and encouraging as our propaganda for agricultural enlightenment is, it is only beginning to succeed. In agriculture, as in medicine, knowledge far outruns practice. The expert agriculturist like the up-to-date physician finds patients callous, often more so in proportion to their need. The great desideratum of agricultural education today is missionary methods and enterprises. We still know all too little, yet could we bring farmers to live up to their best available light they would speedily become the wealthiest of men. One is at times tempted to think that people actually hate wisdom.

When you reflect upon the numerous agricultural graduates sent out, the tons of agricultural books, leaflets and papers, lucid lectures and ardent speeches, profitable tillage, model dairying and breeding that on every hand appeal to our eyes, our reason and our pockets; surfeits of crops following right culture, great bulls more impressive

than great bulletins, and horses, steers, sheep and swine topping markets because bred and fed right, and then see how little, relatively, it all amounts to in the community at large, men's apathy and gainsaying, farms run down and sold for debt, shiftless tillage, breeding males unfit even for the shambles, cows not paying for their keep, and other malpractice galore-viewing all this, I say, who can blame the Honorable Secretary of Agriculture if now and then he breaks out in the psalmist's unparliamentary language, "Understand, ye brutish among the people: and ye fools, when will ye be wise?"

I reject some of the reasonings in Mr. James J. Hill's Minnesota State Fair address referred to in the introduction of this volume. The outlook is less dark than he paints. Lumbering and mining are not so near their end. But the tenor of that address, Mr. Hill's castigation of the country for its still lingering apathy toward agriculture and his solemn appeal for reform, is as just as it is eloquent.

CHAPTER XI

THE RISING GENERATION

"L

O, children are a heritage from the
Lord," says the Good Book.

George Adam Smith translates as follows a morsel of Psalm 110: "Volunteers on the Sacred Mountains are thy people in the day of thy battle; from the womb of the morning come forth to thee the dew of thy youth."

The verse poetically pictures an army of young men with youthful strength and enthusiasm mustering at the command of their king. In multitudes, in fresh vigor, and in dazzling glitter of military array, they come streaming on like the morning sunbeams over a dewy mountain top. With equal fitness and charm may this old Scripture be taken to portray the rally of Kansas and Nebraska young people at school festivals or on a high school day at the university.

Many people at times wonder whether