22 AGRICULTl-RE OF MAINE. 



may boast of their fine crops in one way and another, but 

 Maine always has one great boast, and that boast is that her 

 best crop is the crop of men and women. It is true that our 

 best product is men and women, but I want to say that I wish 

 we hadn't been raising quite so much of our best crop for the 

 export trade. It means a great deal to the community, it 

 means a great deal to the State of Maine, whether we have the 

 kind of educational system that shall point in the right direc- 

 tion. It has meant a great deal to other countries. Why, do 

 you realize that immigration to our country from Northern 

 Europe has almost entirely ceased? And why is it so? Be- 

 cause those countries of Northern Europe have begun to train 

 their boys and girls for home industries. 



Now I realize that I have been theorizing a good deal, 

 although I believe this theory is right and is going to come to 

 pass in action, and I want to bring you down to a matter of 

 hard fact for just a minute. You people who are assembled 

 here are interested in rural education. I know that wherever 

 there is an apple tree there are boys. I know that because there 

 is an apple tree in my back yard, although there are not very 

 good apples on it, there are boys around it. and I know that 

 you people who are interested in the raising of apples are like- 

 wise interested in the raising of boys, and you are interested, 

 a great many of you, in raising boys who are being raised on 

 the farm, who are being educated in country schools, and I 

 want to present to your consideration a very practical prob- 

 lem. I wonder if you can imagine this hall so extended that 

 it will hold an audience on the floor of seven thousand people, 

 and I wonder if your imagination would picture to you that 

 hall with the teaching force of the State of Maine seated in 

 four equal sections. Then out in this quarter section away 

 out here we will imagine the city teachers are seated and they 

 will not occupy a whole section ev^en. There will be a lot of 

 seats in the rear of the section that will be empty and those 

 seats we will fill in with village teachers, and by village teachers 

 I mean teachers who teach in villages having schools that may 

 be graded so as to employ two teachers or more, up to twenty 

 or twenty-five as some of our larger villages have to employ. 

 Our village teachers will begin to fill in and they will take 

 the next section and then they will take some of the third, but 



