The Gospel of the Fak:mers' Institute Work 1G55 



was some excellent advice on the growing of wheat and the fatten 

 ing of hogs, hut there was not one whisper about what we have 

 since learned to call " rural sociology," I do not think the word 

 was in our vocaljularv. Since then we have come to know and to 

 boldly say that it is at least as important to improve the breed of 

 men as the breed of cattle. 



I say with enthusiasm because I believe it so thoroughly; I say 

 with pleasure because I know it is so exactly the belief of our 

 Director — that while the message of the institute may be pri- 

 marily one of better crops, it ought not to stop there. I am sure 

 that it concerns itself not only with corn and cattle, l)ut that it 

 ought to touch the problems of the home, the school, the com- 

 munity and the church — in a word everything which has to do 

 with rural civilization. Only last week I heard reiterated again 

 that old-time inquiry of Horace Bushnell as to the " price of real 

 estate in Sodom," and I insist that while the institute will never 

 ask adherence to any creed or make any tests of faith, still the 

 institute that does not leave men with the upward look and the 

 conviction that man does not live by bread alone, has stopped 

 short of its privileges. 



Fourth and lastly is the field or the people; and to my mind 

 the greatest call for the institute work is expressed in the com- 

 mission, '' Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel," and 

 translated into our modern terms of life it means that the appeal 

 of the institute is primarily made — not to the successful and able 

 farmer but rather to the man who has not yet found himself. I 

 take it that the educational duty of the state concerns itself not 

 so much with the man living, for example, on the exceedingly 

 valuable lands of eastern Long Island or whose happy fortune it is 

 to be born amid the bending orchards of the Ontario shore, but the 

 call of the time is rather to the hill farmer striving for an exist- 

 ence amid the poverty grass of his barren hilltop or the tenant 

 farmer on the last farm. And I want to say this to you, that the 

 very existence of the rural community depends upon his salvation. 

 In every large neighborhood there is room for the man at the top 

 and the man at the bottom and each may live his own life careless 



