INSTITUTE PAPERS. 99 



the one requiring- the highest intellectuahty. He is associated 

 more completely with nature and her ever complex laws, and 

 comes more in contact with the deeper mysteries of nature than 

 any other professional man does or can. While, in addition, 

 he must have executive and mercantile experiences, his work is 

 done in the open amid the charms of nature and in the more 

 complete exercise of all the bodily faculties in their develop- 

 ment than can come to any other man. 



There are three great fundamental factors essential to agri- 

 culture at its best, viz., first, the continuance of farm ownership 

 in the family ; second, intelligence of a high order ; and third, 

 the expansion of the present business. 



Tenancy farming, which is forty per cent, of the farming of 

 the West, is one of soil robbery unaccompanied by improve- 

 ments since the tenant farmer has no interest in perpetuating 

 soil fertility or encouraging the improvements associated with 

 land, nor docs sentiment impel him thereto. The changing of 

 farms of the past generation of New England farming has led 

 farmers to look upon land as a temporary method of obtaining 

 a living from which they are to be released by westward moving, 

 by other business, by retiring to town, selling or exchanging 

 farms, or after a fair competence is secured, the allowing of 

 a farm to drift and to even decline. The farm home should 

 be regarded as the permanent home and property of the family. 

 This from sentimental reasons invites those improvements and 

 surrounding conditions that are inviting and for the permanent 

 interests of those we love. It is on such a farm alone, in such 

 a district or in such a town alone, that we make the highest 

 efforts to develop a permanent and rich social life for the neigh- 

 borhood or the town where our descendants are to mingle and 

 whose conditions are to determine the culture and the happiness 

 of those through whom we attain a form of immortality. Good 

 roads, landscape gardening about the home, generation by gen- 

 eration the gathering in the home and about it of those things 

 which make for culture, the acquisition of a fixed moral stand- 

 ard for the family that the sons and daughters who inherit the 

 traditions of the family in the neighborhood hesitate to violate, 

 are a part of incentives to help achievements. The permanency 

 of the family on the farm invites permanent improvements in 

 drainage, clearing the fields of all obstructions and their en- 



