728 AGRICULTURE 



nition. The agricultural questions that we customarily discuss are 

 those of the individual farmer. The burden of our teaching has been 

 that the farmer must be a better farmer. Only in recent years has it 

 come to be fully recognized that agricultural problems are of the 

 greatest national and governmental significance. Consider how recent 

 is the Land Grant Act, the secretaryship of agriculture in the Presi- 

 dent's cabinet, the Experiment Station Act, the origin of a definite 

 farmers' institute movement, the development at public expense of 

 fertilizer and feed controls and other policing policies, the making 

 of liberal grants of public money for specific agricultural uses. 



Governmental fiscal policies have been shaped primarily for other 

 occupations, as, for example, the tariff for protection. This is pri- 

 marily a manufacturer's policy. It matured with the rise of con- 

 centrated manufacturing. One of the stock arguments of the pro- 

 tectionist when addressing farmers is that any policy that aids manu- 

 facturing interests must indirectly aid them. I am not here to discuss 

 or to criticise tariff legislation, but it is apparent that such legislation 

 is only secondarily of benefit to agriculture. It has been the history 

 of institutions that special and organized interests receive attention 

 before care is given to the common people and the masses. 



We have really not endeavored, as a people, to solve our technical 

 agricultural problems until within the present generation. We have 

 escaped the problems by moving on to the west. Thereby we have 

 fallen into the habit of treating symptoms rather than causes, as the 

 policeman does when he orders an offender to " move on," and leaves 

 the real difficulty for some one else to solve. Even yet, farmers are 

 moving on to find land that is not depleted and regions free of blights 

 and of pests. The real development of agriculture lies in developing 

 the old areas, not in discovering new ones. When virgin land can no 

 longer be had, scientific agriculture will come. An isolated island 

 develops something like a perfected agriculture, as one may see in 

 Bermuda or Jersey. The earth is an island: in time it will be de- 

 veloped. 



As agriculture comprises a multitude of different businesses, every- 

 where touching many sciences and having contact with many public 

 questions, so it is impossible for one person adequately to state even 

 its present and pressing questions. I have been in the habit of inquir- 

 ing of farmers, students, and colleagues what they consider the agri- 

 cultural problems to be. Many of the problems that they have stated 

 to me are temporary, local, or incidental. Others are common to many 

 occupations, having to do with the general constitution of society 

 and the general trend of economic events. In this paper I have tried 

 to assemble statements of such questions as appear to me best to 

 illustrate the complex nature of the subject before us. I wish I could 

 give credit to the sources of all the suggestions, but this is impracti- 



