/ 



ADDRESSES 



Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the State Board 

 of Agriculture, December 15, 1915. 



LAWS OF PLANT AND ANIMAL BREEDING. 



By Arthur D. Cromwell, West Chester, Pa. 



Agriculture is the basic industry. Not long can a nation 

 endure if it neglects its agriculture. One of the interesting things 

 now going on is the way people are reasoning. They no longer 

 say that armies and generals determine who shall win in the war. 

 The people are asking what of the agriculture? What of the 

 mines and the shops? Are the miners, the shop men and the 

 farmers efficient? If they are sufficiently efficient, their nation 

 may prolong the war indefinitely. I am saying this to remind you 

 that we are to wake up in a new world, with demands and appre- 

 ciations quite different from what we might have evolved had 

 |:here been no war fought in Europe. One result of the demands 

 and the apprciations will be that the farmer shall come into his 

 own. The farmer will become respected because he will be 

 efficient and because the people will have become conscious of 

 how dependent they are upon the farmer. 



It is not easy to discover the laws that control things in this 

 old world of ours, but we may be certain that this is a world of 

 struggle and conflict, that out of the conflict there comes progress. 

 The struggle never looked fiercer than it does today, but we must 

 remember that God rules, and out of the conflict there will come 

 the " survival of the fittest," though it should be said that the 

 fittest do not always survive. But in the long run, out of the 

 conflicts and the struggles there is a survival of the fittest. 



There is growing rapidly among us, the notion that the 

 people of this nation must be efficient. There is no preparedness 

 that equals being efficient in field, factory, mine and shop. 



