10 The Bulletin. 



nature of the soils, took the farms in hand for a nominal sum and have 

 made a fortune where the original owners made a failure. The ones 

 with their families are, perhaps, operatives in some cotton mill, while 

 the others, with their families, are veritable lords of the land, using the 

 cotton-mill town as a market for their produce. 



The locomotive existed in the mind of the inventor long before it 

 stood upon the track. The statue always exists in the mind of the 

 sculptor long before it emerges from the stone. So it is with the agri- 

 cultural artist and agricultural manufacturer. His ideal pork, beef, 

 milch or draft animal, his maximum corn, wheat, or cotton crop exists 

 in his mind months before they are found in the herd or in the field. 

 The most fundamentally important things for farmers to possess, there- 

 fore, are not good land, good stock, good tools, good markets, and relia- 

 ble labor, but ideals. 'No castles were ever built on earth that were not 

 first built in the air. These fundamental ideals come only by a careful 

 and diligent study of the factors controlling the development of any 

 chosen vocation. 



It means little to the farmer that farm products are high-priced, if 

 his profits are consumed in hauling them to market. It means little to 

 the farmer to own land capable of producing 50 bushels of corn per 

 acre, if his store of knowledge allows him to gather but 10 bushels per 

 acre. We must, therefore, have good roads, and good schools offering 

 sufficient agricultural instruction. But good roads and good schools 

 alone will not make us a great agricultural state. These are but the 

 tools with which we work. ITothing is further from the truth than 

 the old adage that knowledge is power. Knowledge is not power. It 

 never has been. Power comes only as a result of an application of energy 

 to knowledge. Every one has seen the "walking encyclopedia" who 

 never exerts any force in his community. You have also seen the man 

 of unbounded energy — nervous, working, watching — always in a hurry 

 and never getting anywhere; but when you find a man or woman pos- 

 sessed of great energy with an abundance of knowledge to direct it, 

 you find a person who is a power in the land. 



There is not one volt more electro-motive force in the world to-day 

 than there was 10,000 years ago, when it was manifested only in the 

 thunderbolt and in the destructive shafts of lightning ; but since the in- 

 vention of the electric motor, even the cobbler in his shop uses the light- 

 ning as a beast of burden. The motor does not generate the power, 

 neither does the electric current generate the power; but join them to- 

 gether, and every wheel in the industrial world may be propelled by the 

 force. So it is with the farmer. "When he has gained sufficient knowl- 

 edge to give proper direction to his energy, he will be proud to show us 

 his fields of waving grain and his herds of fat cattle. Power, then, is 

 energized knowledge. 



The Worth Carolina farmer has always had the energy, and within 

 the last ten vears he has, at a very rapid rate, been acquiring the 



