Farmers' Week in Agricultural College. 95 



how Missouri prairies may best uplift ]\Iissouri people. The growing 

 bigness of the barn must mean less labor for the fanner and less for the 

 farmer's wife, a broader, higher outlook for his sons and daughters, 

 books and travel and college and spiritual life and character. The 

 bigger the barn the less should it be the only discernable fact upon the 

 roadside, nay, even the most conspicuous. It must be convertible into 

 terms of service. Never is it an end in itself. There are other things 

 on the Road to Tomorrow. 



Next the factory, with its giant smoke stack, claims attention. 

 Machines have supplemented, nay, almost supplanted hands. Why, 

 cows are milked now by machinery and babies raised in incubators. 

 The material civilization of a country may be judged by the number of its 

 smoke stacks. The factory has come to lengthen and multiply men's 

 arms. With the growth of the world's population, there were more 

 mouths to feed. Some philosopher, thinking over the question, said 

 there would be starvation in a century. Production could not keep 

 pace with consumption, urged Malthus. The factory came because 

 another man thought it into being and the philosopher's prophecy went 

 unfulfilled. Where in the old days man was his own loom and black- 

 smith shop, making his own tools and clothing, he depends now upon 

 others for their production. Yesterday an entire factory was carried 

 under the individual hat. Today the most skilled laborer is but a cog 

 in the great whirling wheel. Yesterday each wrote unaided, with long 

 and tedious effort, the parchment pages of a book. To make this vol- 

 ume — paper, binding, type, press work, all — required a thousand inter- 

 dependent hands, a hundred machines and a single day. With consid- 

 eration of the factory comes consideration of the wage problem. The 

 rights of capital and the wrongs of labor make a burning issue. The 

 factory brings about congestion in the cities and the problems of the 

 municipality press for solution. By combination captains of industry 

 arise, commanding regiments of soldiers in the industrial army which 

 feeds and clothes mankind. The captains clash with the soldiers and 

 strikes and lockouts come. INIen are thrown together on the Road to 

 Tomorrow by the new industrial conditions. They do not live far 

 enough apart to be neighborly. How they jostle each other by the road- 

 side! Interdependencse succeeds independence. ]\Ian is no longer, if 

 ever, self-made ; he is society-made and bears in walk and look the hall- 

 mark of his multitudinous creator. We have come to the canned goods 

 century. We depend upon the factory for our dress and for our din- 

 ners. Freedom from much physical labor has followed the development 

 of the factory in modern life, but the new and startling problems which 

 accompany it may well give even the most hopeful pause. 



