179 



tho niPinbors of my board of control, like tlio rest of you. I had with one of 

 them the otlier (hiy. not a trouble, but a discussion. I used this illustration of 

 red spot in ehee.se witli him. I said: " It seems to me that wlien we have soue 

 into factories to see we are right, and have demonstrated tlie appliiability of 

 the method we proposed, and tlien have phieed that in simjvle terms, as we try 

 to in our popular bulletins or leaflets, before every cheesemaker in the State 

 of New Y(n-k. we have done our duty." Hut his answer was : " The cheese- 

 maker will not read your bulletin, and unless you go right under his nose, where 

 he may see it. it will not become elTective in his case." 



Now, where is my responsibility? Am I responsible for the inertia, for the 

 lack of alertness, for the stupidity of that manV What is my duty— to go all 

 over the State, in every corner, and to pl.ace undt>r the nose of every man a 

 demonstratiou, or have I done my duty by him when I have made it possible for 

 him, with ordinary alertness, with ordinary intelligence, and a l)usiness mind 

 and impulses, to get hold of the whole thing? Why. gentlemen, if we accept the 

 proposition that we are resjwnsible for these inert fellows, where will our dem- 

 onstrations end, and where is the fund? I know that Illinois has the biggest 

 one in the United States. I do not mean that she shall have for a great while. 

 Now. that is the itrojuisition — where is the limit of responsibility? I am not 

 taking sides on this, but I am placing before you what you all understand and 

 appreciate as clearly as I do, I have no doubt, in regard to the situation. What 

 shall our answer be? The best we can do, we can not get to a whole lot of men. 

 We may place demonstration work in every county of the State where we are, 

 and in several places in each county, ami there will be a very large percentage 

 of the farmers who will not see that demonstration work any more than they 

 will read the bulletins. 



H. J. Whkeler. of Rhode Island. If 1 understand it. there is no authority 

 at all in the Hatch Act for disseminating anything in the line of agricidtural 

 information which has not been ascertained by investigation. 1 am very sure 

 we have all been warned that not a cent of that money can legitimately, 

 according to the strict interpretation of the Hatch Act. be used for anything in 

 the line of demonstration work or in tabidating the results of material already 

 known, but for publishing and disseminating what the individual stations may 

 ascertain by experiments. 



In our State we have had this under consideration. After something seems 

 to have been settled on the station farm under our own conditions, the next 

 thing is to ascertain by experiments whether the rest of the State is in the same 

 condition or not, or whether this is generally applicable or not, and we do that 

 by going into each county and selecting a number of representative fields and 

 trying the matter there. When we have ascertained by experiment that the 

 condition in each county is essentially that which we have found at our station 

 the matter is then turned over to the extension department of the college, and it 

 was my pleasure to propose the first raid on the State treasury to get money 

 enough for such a demonstratiou department in the winter of 1892-93, and we 

 now have such a demonstration department. After we have found out to our 

 satisfaction that a certain thing is helpful, then the demonstration department 

 of the college takes it up and prosecutes it in an educational way, and that is 

 demonstration. 



T. F. Hunt, of New York. I want to insist that the questions which farmers 

 ask regarding how to manage their farms are perfectly proper. When a man 

 writes to a station for some information on the principles of fertilizers his 

 questions are answered willingly, because you have a bulletin on the principles 

 of fertilizers which you can send to him. The only reason you may not answer 

 questions regarding farm management is either you have not the information 



