804 THE INDUSTRIAL GROUP 



psychical traits corresponding to the phases of industrial evolution 

 through which we have been passing. We have a society which, 

 broadly speaking, has become cooperative under competition, but 

 many men have not acquired those psychical characteristics which 

 adapt them to a society at the same time cooperative and com- 

 petitive. 



This point, that there is a lack of correspondence between many 

 men and classes of men and the particular phase of industrial evolu- 

 tion reached at a given moment is one to which in my opinion great 

 importance should be attached; and I beg, therefore, to offer an 

 illustration taken from the changed and changing conditions of 

 American agriculture. Not that I mean thereby to imply the absence 

 of similar changes elsewhere. Quite the contrary. I take this 

 illustration because it is familiar to me from observation and because 

 it is especially striking. 



Successful agriculture is becoming daily a more complicated occu- 

 pation, requiring a larger and higher type of man as time goes on. 

 We have more and better machinery and less and less merely manual 

 toil. We plant, cultivate, dig, and harvest by machinery. This 

 means the accumulation of an increasing amount of capital, an 

 awaiting results or a lengthening-out of the period between effort and 

 the fruition of effort; also it means the capacity to handle the 

 machinery effectively. 



We have a continuous evolution from simplicity to complexity.- 

 As Professor Elwood Mead has well said in one of his Irrigation 

 Reports: " The traction engine and the automobile have both an 

 assured place in the economic operations of farms. Improvements 

 in electrical transmission render it certain that water power is to be 

 used more largely than in the past. Farm buildings, instead of being 

 simply storage places for grain or shelters for live-stock, are becoming 

 as complex in their designs and uses as factories." 1 



Irrigation also shows the need of a new type of man in agriculture. 

 The old-type farmer was by training an individualist. He looked to 

 himself for success, and his isolation in his activities so influenced 

 his character that his individualism seemed to become a part of Ms 

 nature. But when the farmer from Old England or New England 

 goes to the " Far West," where the only agriculture is irrigated 

 agriculture, he must unlearn his individualism and become a co- 

 operative man as a condition of success. The first farmers in a state 

 like Colorado cultivate the bottom lands by means of simple, inex- 

 pensive ditches. Even this implies the use of more brain power, as a 

 knowledge of the proper ways to apply water to secure the best result 



1 Review of Irrigation Investigation for 1902, Washington, D. C., in the 

 Annual Report of the Office of Experiment Stations, p. 368, United States De- 

 partment of Agriculture. 



