252 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Due. 



INSTITUTE SUPPLY A NEED. 



In response to this, the hit est great educational movement in the 

 interest of agriculture, the Farmers' Institute was organized, and 

 is now sent out all over the land with its skilled teachers and trained 

 speakers, going to the people in every hamlet, meeting them direct 

 face to face, carrying to them the truth which they so much need. 

 The Institute is going out as the great distributing agency of the 

 colleges, stations and National Department of Agriculture of the 

 I'niled States, to disseminate far and wide the knowledge they pos- 

 sess. No more effective agency for the uplifting of agriculture has 

 ever been devised. What it will do in future years, it is impossible 

 to predict. That it will gradually come into contact with all of our 

 people seems now to be assured, and that it will mold the character 

 of rural life, and change the crude education which country children 

 now receive into that of the most advanced of any in the town and 

 city schools, are to many of us, at least two of the valuable results 

 which these Farmers' Institutes are destined to secure. 



They were organized to supply a need. They found a vacant place 

 in our system of public education, and have undertaken to meet the 

 want. They are engaging as teachers in this school the most 

 capable, practical and scientific men and women that the country 

 has, until now, as has been stated, over 950 of these teachers are 

 regularly employed, and many thousands of others are occasionally 

 engaged as the needs of the work in the several localities demand. 



The Institute is the greatest agricultural university of the United 

 States into which about one million of our people have already come, 

 and under whose influence we hope to gather the almost thirty 

 millions of other citizens that compose the agricultural population 

 of these United States. 



With this great force constantly at work, and with yearly increas- 

 ing power, the outlook for agriculture in the United States is bright 

 with hope, and all that is needed to complete our salvation as agri 

 cultural people is that we ourselves shall join hands in aiding and 

 in encouraging these unselfish and valuable institutions, demanding 

 that they shall have local, State and National support sufficient 

 for their work until agricultural education in its highest and most 

 beneficent sense has become the possession of every man, woman 

 and child, capable of receiving it, to the remotest districts of our 

 land. 



The CHAIR: We will now be entertained with a whistling solo 

 by Miss May Stewart Smith. 



Miss Smith rendered very sweetly, "Every Morn I Bring Thee 

 Violets," and as an encore, "The Last Rose of Summer." 



