No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICUL-TURE. 455 



agricultural education. That is the Guild, aud the combiuation on 

 which it rests. It is not undertaken to duplicate the work which 

 the Agricultural Colleges and the other interests are doing, but 

 to supplement them, 



A number of wealthy, successful business men of Chicago have 

 bought farms outside the city, as the tendency of the day is. Some 

 of them were men who had grown up on the farm but had not lived 

 on it. They had been driven i'roiu the farm by the naturiii tendency 

 which has prevailed during the last forty years. What were these 

 forces that tended to drive men from the farm? What is the econo- 

 mic reason which has changed the American people from 95 per 

 cent, rural fifty years ago to 50 per cent, rural today? Why are 

 all the people today in Kussia and China living on the land? Why 

 are practically all the people in Mississippi living on the land? Sim- 

 ply because the economic etiiciency or productive capacity of the in- 

 dividual is low. When one person can produce only enough to feed 

 himself, there is no possil)ility of artistic and literary development 

 or any development which makes for the cultured side of life. In 

 the hard, pioneer conditions, when we were struggling to feed our- 

 selves, our farms on the stony lands of New England and of Penn- 

 sylvania, Kew York and Ohio produced practically all, and the energy 

 of the people was necessarily directed to the production of feed 

 enough to supply the necessaries of life. With the opening of the 

 pioneer prairies of the West, came the invention of farm machinery, 

 and better plows and harrows and harvesters took the place of the 

 cradle and the sickle and the scythe, and all of that farm machinery 

 is the product of inventive American brains; and the ingenuity of 

 the American inventors has been largely increased by the growing 

 demands of the farmer for more and better machinery; all this has 

 made it possible for the farmer to have many things that were for- 

 merly denied him — possible for him to make use of the artistic and 

 luxurious development of the last half century. 



The economic cause of the movement of the State from agriculture 

 to industry, is the increasing efficiency of American farm labor 

 through machinery, and through better land on which to apply his 

 labor. Today, one man feeds not two or three, as he did in pioneer 

 days, and as he does today in Kussia, India, China, and Mississippi, 

 but he feeds a hundred. The teeming thousands of New York and 

 Chicago, the teeming centers of America, aud of the old world, are 

 largely fed by our American farmer. So it is perfectly natural that 

 we should have people moving from the country to the city. 



In the economic movement from the country to the city, what 

 elements are most likely to shift? Is it the bright and efficient 

 labor that passes from the old industry to the new, or is it the man 

 who is less active, more satisfied with existing conditions, more 

 ready to do what he is doing, and what his father did? I need not 

 answer that question. The energy and brains and efficient leader- 

 ship of the last half century has been centered in the cities; it has 

 built our railroads and established our commerce established our 

 cities, and made the United States occupy the position it holds today, 

 of the crowning nation of the world. And the farms are the super- 

 structure on which this nation is built; they are the foundation upon 

 which all this energy and power which makes for the leaders of the 

 world, rests. But in what condition has that movement out of agri- 



