112 TWELFTH REPORT. 



farmer's discontent and the oliaracter of the alleviation which should be 

 ajiplied. One will look in vain through the newspaper and magazine 

 articles upon agriculture during the recent years for a gioomv note con- 

 cerning this industry. We read, on the contrary, titles concerning the 

 *'New American Farmer,'' the "New Spirit of the Farm," "Seven and a 

 Half Billions from the P^irni," etc., etc., as testimonies concerning the 

 new standing of this vocation. 



Few indeed of the manifold activities of our late great" executive were 

 more widely censured on account of needlessness than was the appoint- 

 ment of the Rural Life Commission when it was thought that the pur- 

 pose of this investigation was to discuss the impoverishment or waning 

 prosperit.v of our farming class. 



A single small observation which has come within my ow^n experience 

 may serve as a slight straw to show tlie prosperous trend of agriculture. 

 I refer to the increasing popularity of technical training in this pursuit 

 to the young industrialists of the land. I think no one has failed to 

 notice a certain relationship between the prosperity of an industry and 

 the schools which minister to that industry. The industrial awakening 

 of the early part of the decade for example stimulated engineering 

 schools everywhere. The conservation movement which followed a few 

 years later gave forestry schools a period of wide popularity, and other 

 instances might easily be recalled. In conformity, I believe with this 

 connection between occupational prosj)erity and profesvsional school 

 prosperity the fact of agricultural profitableness is shown by the high, 

 tide in point of numbers which technical courses in agriculture have 

 everywhere recently attained. 



An allusion was made a moment ago to the newspaper and magazine 

 proofs of the thriftiness of the farming class, but no one will consult 

 authority of this sort without having his attention called to evidence 

 pointing in the other direction in regard to that class of i>ersons who 

 draw salaries. The significance of this situation with regard to salaries 

 which are suffering from halting or fully arrested development is ap- 

 parent when we accept the popular belief that economic society is un- 

 dergoing a transfornuition from the leadership of the small but inde- 

 pendent business man to that of the salaried official, in the large con- 

 cern. 



Another industrial class which has seemingly benefited but little from 

 the prevalence of high prices is the money lending capitalist. Reason- 

 ing here from the flimsiest of analogies, one concludes that if half the 

 earnings which were attributed to these Wall Street people during the 

 low price period of the nineties were really received by them then, the 

 reversal of their income situation through the present high prices must 

 be extreme indeed. 



By an outright usurpation of the point of view possibly, or else as 

 a species of tribute to the sovereignty of the profit variety of income 

 in our economic organization, we have accustomed ourselves to the prac- 

 tice of identifying "good times" with high prices and "bad times" with 

 a low level of exchange ratios. Whether the strain upon this tradition 

 is as near or not the breaking point as the public press would have us 

 believe, we have had at any rate a great public excitement over high 

 prices. In his annual message of last fall, President Taft called atten- 



