74 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



benefited by the degradation of any other class. You might 

 as well say it is a good thing for me that that left hand of 

 mine has been forced by lack of training to refrain from doing 

 the things that my right does. You might just as well say 

 that. I never will beHeve it. I do not believe it is a good 

 thing because it gives more utility to my right hand. I do 

 not believe it is a good thing to keep any class of farmers 

 down so that those who are shrewd and prosperous can do 

 better. I do not believe it, I never have believed it, and I 

 never will. I do not care who beHeves it. I say that those 

 who through ignorance and lack of ambition fail to do their 

 full duty as farmers, and to take advantage of the opportunities 

 for education, will always prove a dead weight in agriculture, 

 so heavy that all the uplifting forces of modern education 

 and organization can hardly help to raise American agriculture 

 to the place it ought to fill. Therefore I say that the institute 

 speaker should go down to the root of things; down past the 

 grange, down past the farmers' club, down past every known 

 organization of agriculture, away down to those men, and 

 build a fire under the men who are frozen in their indiffer- 

 ence, thaw them out, and make them lift their feet out of the 

 conditions that hold them down. 



Now it appears also that it is always best to hold an in- 

 stitute in a hall where the people are in the habit of attending. 

 It goes without saying that the hall should be made comfort- 

 able so the people will want to come again. They should 

 not have to sit there and be frozen. You must give the people 

 a comfortable hall, or, at least, a place where the people who 

 do come will not be uncomfortable. Then you should make 

 the place known. Sometimes I have gone to a town where 

 there was to be an institute in the afternoon or evening, and 

 have tried to find out where it was to be held, without good 

 success. I went to Trenton, N. J., once, and in that great 

 city of 60,000 people I traveled up and down trying to find out 

 where the State convention of the prohibition party was to be 



