260 



Missouri Agricultural Report. 



Prof. A. W. Taylor. 



MEANS FOR RURAL PROGRESS. 



(Professor A. W. Taylor, Bible College of Missouri, Columbia, Mo.) 



Others have treated specific parts of the general theme of 



this conference. It is my part to try 

 to bind these various parts together 

 and to show how they are interdepend- 

 ent and interrelated. 



The farmer is the average man, 

 and the average man is the best kind 

 of a man out of which to make a 

 nation. Picking up the picture of the 

 farmer in his working clothes, Roose- 

 velt struck the table with his fist and 

 said, "That is the man I want to 

 know." He is the man who makes up 

 the bulk of the common people in the 

 United States and his class is by far 

 the largest in the country. President Wilson, scholar though he 

 is, said he would not have experts and scientists in the executive 

 departments of administration; he could trust the man of 

 affairs to have better balanced judgment in matters of state. 

 It is from the farm that our leaders largely come, and they 

 make good because of the fund of common sense a boyhood of 

 industrious life on the farm gives to men. 



As the farmer thinks so the country ought to go, for we are 

 still an agricultural country, notwithstanding the tendency 

 toward the city. There is a tendency toward the city, but it is 

 not so much against the rural regions as the face of the figures 

 might lead us to think. In 1880 70.5 per cent of the population 

 was rural; in 1890 it was 63.9 per cent, and in 1910 it was 53.7 

 per cent. Yet there was an actual increase in the number of 

 people on the farms; the city did not quite absorb the gross 

 increase of population. It was a relative increase over the rural 

 districts; but the actual movement from the farm to the city is 

 perhaps not over 10 per cent in a decade — that is, not more 

 than 10 per cent of our farm folk go to the city each decade. 



We do not need so many farmers as we did a generation ago. 

 Then it took two men to create enough to feed themselves and 

 the third man in the town. Now, with farm machinery, one 

 farmer can feed the three. I have traveled among the country 



