No. 5. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 323 



pickles and rye bread for lunch. The crops raised on virgin soil 

 would now be envy of the most eloquent modern institute speaker on 

 soils, soil fertility, cowpeas, soy beans, crimson clover and alfalfa. 

 There were no breakfast foods, canned beans, canned salmon, pressed 

 ham, fried potatoes, canned corn, tomatoes, beans, post toasties, corn 

 flakes, shredded wheat biscuits and other costly luxuries to create 

 the high cost of living. The butcher, baker and grocer did not visit 

 rural districts daily and the laundry man taking the farmers' linen 

 would have had to travel over an entire township to secure enough 

 shirts, skirts and collars for a half day's washing. The things now 

 so convenient and costly create idleness and evils that are reflected 

 in divorce proceedings and family feuds. In the past as in the pres- 

 ent some families raised boj^s that were incorrigible and too lazy 

 and cunning to work; these, if it could be afforded, were sent away 

 to an academy and to college to become the pride of the neighborhood 

 as doctors, lawyers, professors, legislators, bosses and aristocrats by 

 virtue of a diploma and divine right. 



Things were difr'erent before that race destroying innovation, the 

 auto, was introduced. So long as husking-matches, snitzing parties, 

 country dances and spelling-bees were a feature in rural affairs, 

 there were fewer maiden ladies and bachelors abroad in the land. 

 To-day the farmer dares to rub up against the elite of society even 

 to the "400," and to discount them in good sense, intelligence, moral- 

 ity and the economy of nature. Farmers are preservers of the 

 human race, although they may be tolerated as a necessity and re- 

 garded as a necessary evil, and disturbers of the criminal cunning. 

 It is time that they appreciate their importance and unite in a com- 

 mon cause for their own betterment, in the interest of universal 

 peace, and the alleviation of the distressed at home and abroad. It 

 is time to protest against the uncalled for activities of a class of self- 

 constituted guardians of agriculture and rural affairs, and against 

 the centralizing in expensive departments and an army of super- 

 numeraries not desired, never asked for or demanded. There were 

 no petitions circulated and signed by the people to have inflicted on 

 the tax payers, a horde of hungry aspirants to public employment 

 tumbling over one another for the coveted prize. 



It is becoming so with all the departments, divisions, agents, in- 

 spectors and law that one cannot feel safe to make a concrete walk, 

 behead a fowl, kill a calf, or catch a fish, without a permit for fear 

 of conflicting with some restraining authority or provision emanat- 

 ing from the mind of someone whose experience and mental training 

 was derived from watching the shadows of towers and tall buildings 

 in some city office, before a roll top desk on a revolving chair. It 

 would make a very interesting picture if the thoughts of those who 

 manifest so much concern about agriculture could be photographed 

 and displayed on a reel as moving pictures and the motive back of 

 their activities analyzed. If it were possible to open the cranium 

 and close them without injury, to study tlie convolutions of their 

 brain, the blood corpuscles coursing through their bodies, and the 

 composition of their brain cells to learn the proportion of nitrogen, 

 hydrogen and oxygen, it would possibly show an excess of one of the 

 gases, an abnormal condition conducive to farmomania an indis- 

 tinguished germ producing an epidemic. "Farraonania: A mental 

 aberration, a hallucination, a phantasy, a brain storm on rural 



