136 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



is one of the pathetic things to see the way the farmer behaves 

 after he gets into town. He is in a state of daily unrest; he 

 doesn't have the environment that is congenial to him, and if he 

 has his farm near enough he goes back and forth and is at a 

 great disadvantage. But then there is another thing. He is 

 not prepared by the life that he has been living for the environ- 

 ment into which he has come, and therefore oftentimes he is the 

 unhappiest man in the community. .Longs for the day when 

 he can get back to the farm, and if that does not happen he just 

 simply settles down into a state described by our late friend, 

 Grover Cleveland, as a state of "innocuous desuetude," and that 

 is about as bad a condition as he can get into. I don't know just 

 exactly what Grover meant by it, but I know it must be a bad 

 state, because the phrase has fixed itself in our minds and we 

 are all living in dread of it. 



The farmers' heart: The country is full of churches. The 

 mission of these churches is with reference to the heart of this 

 man and his wife and his son and his daughter. These churches 

 in all of our denominations are getting weaker and weaker. 

 There are several reasons for that. One of the reasons is that 

 because of the facilities of transportation and the circulation of 

 literature and the various opportunities of self-culture that 

 come from the growth of our educational system, and things 

 like that, the taste has risen, and therefore the rural community 

 is not satisfied with what once satisfied it, and it does not seem 

 able or willing to provide for a better condition of things. Hence, 

 the country churches are emptying and the windows are being 

 knocked out of them and the doors broken off their hinges, and 

 things are going to rack and ruin. There needs to be a gather- 

 ing together of the people in a more compact community and the 

 elimination of the old sectarian spirit from the community in 

 order that they may be able to get together in the worship of 

 God and in growth in grace and in wisdom. 



Now that was a nice little thing that Professor Emberson 

 said with reference to conditions up there at Alma — the getting 

 together of those four churches and forming one church and hav- 

 ing a young man preaching to them. They are now going on 

 splendidly. Why, they did business together before that, and 

 they went to weddings together, and went to funerals together, 

 and intermingled right straight along, the Methodist, the 

 Presbyterian and the Baptist. Why, I never heard of a young 

 fellow falling in love with a girl because she was a Presbyterian. 



