38 



every man can afford these investments. He may not be i^repared to use them 

 intelligently and therefore profitably. The result is in many communities that 

 we have a large number of sales annually. Men whose lives have been spent 

 in rural pursuits restlessly turn from the farm to ordinary labor as a means 

 of livelihodd. The result is an absenteeism on the faru). City men and men 

 of some means have been buying land either as a safe or speculative investment. 

 The result is a species of landlordism on the one hand and of inferior farming 

 on the other. Under such con<lit!ons it may not be expected that renters" sons 

 will remain on the farm and become the sturdy yeomanry of the country. 

 Neither is it probable that the children of these people will manifest any 

 great interest in agricultural education. There is a manifest tendency toward 

 intelligent farming. It is evident that the old methods are often exjjensive to 

 the point of wastefulness. Men lacking education are not profitable even as 

 employees. Much less are they capable of satisfactory service as farm mana- 

 gers for owners of land. Su<-h i)eo])le are now moving to our cities for ordinary 

 day labor, in the hope that their children may sometime liecome clerks or sub- 

 ordinates in the great whirl of commerce. They are unfit for the farm, are 

 prejudiced against it, are unwilling to fit themselves for it. and eventually 

 swell the population that inliabits the cheapest quarters in our cities or ekes 

 out a miserable existence in a small village. Such peoi>le are not needed on 

 the farm, and eventually they become superfluous in the town or city. 



(3) A third specification among these conditions lies in the difiiculty in bring- 

 ing town or city people to rural life. They are quite willing, many of them, to 

 live at a convenient distance from the city with a large investment in a small 

 area of ground for jiersonal comfort and a certain type of luxury that only the 

 country can bring, hut they are not easily brought to do the actual farm work 

 necessary for the develoi)ment of agriculture. \^'e can not conceive of a coimtry 

 as a city, made up of town lots of 10 to 2(j acres in area. The truth is that the 

 city-bred people have little conception of what rural life really is. Many of 

 them have an exaggerated prejudice concerning it. The training in action, asso- 

 ciations, exciting amusements, and all that go to make up the externalities of 

 city life unite to unfit an individual for the peaceful pursuits of rural living. 

 Whatever hope there is. therefore, for the rui-al districts must eventually come 

 from the rural districts themselves. It is to the population on the farm that we 

 must turn for the perpetuity and improvement of rural life. The record made 

 in the past by choice rural individuals in the city has greatly helped and im- 

 proved the city. I see no evidence that the city will ever help or improve the 

 country. The agricultural college, therefore, will find one of its most pressing 

 and important problems in the country itself. It may be very entertaining and 

 quite fashionable to chat in a city parlor about the beauties of agriculture, but 

 the real problems of agriculture are on the farm and not in the drawing room. 



(4) A fourth specification is the question of profits. There is no doubt that 

 men desire to make money and that the profit in farming determines the atti- 

 tude of many for or against this pursuit. Many young men leave the farm 

 because they see that their fathers have spent a life without accumulating much 

 money and because the fatliers oftentimes complain that they have not made 

 money. It is not uncommon under these conditions to see a greatly impover- 

 ished' farm associated with an unfilled purse. As an individual question, we 

 can not blame any man for having a desire for an improved condition. We 

 can not ask him to stay in a place where there is no prospect of inii)rovement. 

 If he were willing to do this he \^•ould be fitted neither for a farmer nor for a 

 business man. It is not, therefore, the personal phase of this question that I 

 am now suggesting. It is rather the general question of in-ofit in farming as 

 having to do with the tendency away from the farm. We recognize that the 

 speculative values in farm lands constitute no part of ordinary farming. The 

 man who buys cheap land at $10 i)er acre and holds it for ten years and finds 

 it worth $30 per acre has not made money by farming; he has made money by 

 speculative investment in farming lands. As soon as it is realized that this 

 speculative value is an uncertain quantity the attractiveness of such investments 

 ceases. Multitudes of farmers can not be and ought not to be sjieculators ; they 

 should be farmers, and the problem is to make them profitable farmers. In the 

 consideration of this question we must recognize the impoverished condition of 

 much of the farming land of our country. To be sure we have recognized this 

 as a fact. I appeal now to recognize it as a condition- a condition that threat- 

 ens the permanent usefulness of the farm and the farmer. I find a very wide- 

 spread belief that much of our farming land never can be made {)rofitable for 

 the individual farmer. If this is a permanent condition our colleges and experi- 



