442 Bureau of Farmers' Institutes. 



and that day the occupation of all those farmer shoemakers was 

 gone — all except one man, and he continued to make shoes., be- 

 cause he made shoes that would fit, and the very man who had 

 invented that marvelous marchine made a pilgrimage to this cob- 

 bler to be measured and fitted for a pair of shoes. So, too, I 

 believe, that with all our modern tendency toward co-operation 

 and aggregation, when a superlative dairy article is wanted it 

 will be made on and sold from the farm. 



But I have neglected to speak of what is by far the most 

 important example and subject of evolution, and that is the evo- 

 lution of the dairyman himself. After all, the man is infinitely 

 greater and better than the cow. And the dairyman has grown 

 from a man, who was required to know only how to put hay 

 into a manger and draw milk iuto a pail, into a man who real- 

 izes that he is dealing with a great and complex wonder. While 

 dairying has been growing from a rude art into a great science, the 

 dairyman has been growing from a laborer into a student. That 

 thousands of cow-keepers have remained untouched by this up- 

 ward movement makes the truth none the less real. 



O, my friends, there is no man on earth into whose face we 

 may not look with pride and say, " I am a dairyman — a student 

 of the wonders and the mysteries of the cow." The value and 

 the nobility of a profession is not measured by the dollars we 

 can get out of it. It is not measured by the leisure or the ease 

 that it may leave us in this world. But the question we must 

 ask of any profession is this: Does it uplift and not degrade 

 those whom it touches? Does it bring out of me the very best 

 physical and intellectual possibilities that are within me? And 

 when you think how the foundations of dairying are laid in the 

 deep things of God and nature, when you think what a. elean 

 and worthy calling it is in every way, it seems to me that as 

 nearly as earth-born occupations can, it measures up to these 

 ideals. 



