Farmers^ Week in Agricultural College. 97 



across the Hellespont to pimisli the city of the Violet Crown, more 

 powerful for good or ill than all the soldiery of earth. We spend, and 

 rightl}" spend, npon it more than we appropriate for any other public 

 cause. A Rockefeller gives a king's ransom to a single school and it 

 is scarce noticed amid the rising tide of gifts to education. ^Millions 

 only are reckoned with, while a hundred years ago a great American 

 college entered upon its endowment books with care and gratitude : ' ' One 

 soup bone — one shilling!" 



Beside the factory and the railway station, with its web of wire, 

 and schoolhouse and scientific laboratory, office building and red barn, 

 the Road to Tomorrow holds church spire as well. Like index finger 

 pointing up to heaven it stands. ]\Ian has gone from the primeval 

 groves by w^ay of tabernacle, mosque and temple to basilica and Christ- 

 ian church. He has built to the Eternal One a house with stained 

 glass windows, through which the sunshine sifts on cushioned pews. 

 Is the country church spire the rallying point for modern good? Or 

 has it become a dying thing apart? Has the church risen to the needs 

 of its new environment or does it yet linger on the horizon of Yesterday, 

 groping amid the mists of mysticism and disputing about the cast-off 

 garments of a worn-out creed? Man has put God within a splendid 

 church and — has he left Him there ? 



Complex are the problems of civilization. Varied are the new de- 

 mands. We Americans have placed for solution of many of these 

 problems, for answering these new demands on the Road to Tomorrow 

 the people's State house and there the capital dome. Beneath are met 

 the people 's representatives to serve the people. Rail as we may at the 

 result of this or that election, complain as we may at that which comes 

 from beneath the capitol dome, before America there was no election, no 

 real republic, no free people, only a king and his subjects, a patriarch 

 and his tribe. It is not strange, therefore, that those who come to- 

 gether under the capital dome make some mistakes, that laws are crude 

 sometimes, that self-interest and party strife and greed of place or gain 

 defeat, may only delay the coming of the best. 



The last conspicuous object upon the Road to Tomorrow is that for 

 which factory and railway, school and church, agriculture and com- 

 merce and government are made — the individual home. There are new 

 problems in the smoke stack and the telegraph pole, the schoolhouse 

 chimney and the tall church spire, the office building and the capitol 

 dome. There is the old, old problem around the hearth-stone. The 

 rising tide of materialistic thought and of scientific doubt is only dan- 

 gerous when it engulfs the home. It is the new grouping that makes 

 new problems. AVe live so near to one another. The shadow which 



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