No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 285 



up aud oppose all new ideas, and when one comes out in a news- 

 paper, tliey want it stopped right away, and in nine cases out of ten, 

 they owe tor their subscriptions. When such a person dies, the 

 editor has to print it under the head of "News," and is always 

 glad that such a person has finally consented to be buried. This 

 may be an old story to many of you, but it impresses very forcibly 

 the large number of students who drift away from these schools 

 at the age of 14 and 15. The last statistics I found, showed tliat 

 out of every 100 people starting into the elementary schools, seven 

 get to tlie high school, and out of every 100 getting to the high 

 school, live get to college. 



You will ask what becomes of that vast army that never get to 

 college. They drop out into the so-called dark alleys of the world, 

 become boot-blacks, newsboys, messenger boys, etc. This proves 

 to me very decidedly that our public school system, that our sys- 

 tem — of course, our system to-day is an improvement upon the sys- 

 tem of the past, but it has not gotten away from it so far yet; 

 it is educating about 10%; the other 90% are going away from 

 school at the age of 15. I think I see a partial remedy to keep 

 some of those people in school and that remedy is this, to give 

 them a little molasses and not feed them sour kraut all the time. 

 What I mean by molasses is inculcate something in the school sys- 

 tem which will give the boy and girl an inkling of something they 

 can do or some vocation they can take up in after life. Did you 

 ever stop to ask a boy what he goes to school for? Have any of 

 you ever tried out that proposition, especially with a boy that is 

 12 or 15 years old? Sometime, if you are ever in a school, you 

 try out that proposition and it will amuse you greatly what the 

 boy goes to school for. He has the idea that he has got to go 

 to school until he is 16, then he is going out to get a job. I have 

 tried out the proposition many times and it is the compulsory side 

 they look at entirely. 



The average boy going to school is like Pat and the rabbits. Pat 

 came to this country all filled with curiosity and went down to a 

 railroad station one day and saw a box with a wild rabbit that 

 someone was shipping to a friend. His curiosity got the best of 

 him. He went over to the box, looked at the address, lifted up the 

 cover, reached down in the box, began to fumble around carefully, 

 and all of a sudden out went the rabbit, over the railroad track 

 and Pat after it. When he got on the hill, he saw the rabbit wrig- 

 gling his tail at him in defiance, and he said, "You rascal, keep on, 

 you don't know where you are going, the address is back there on 

 the box." (Laughter.) The average boy going to school is like the 

 rabbit, he don't know where he is going simply because there is 

 nothing addressed to the life of that boy to make him look forward 

 to some job or some vocation in life. I am talking about the boy, 

 but I see ladies in the audience, and I don't want them to feel 

 slighted. President Taft said that he thought if we taught the 

 girl some trade, that the matrimonial proposition would be practi- 

 cally solved, and to sum it up in brief, he said, "When some weasel- 

 eyed, skin-flint of a good-for-nothing came along and wanted to marry 

 that girl, and she could earn her own living, she wouldn't have to 

 put up with anything like that simply because she is afraid to be 

 an old maid." 



18 



