146 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



progress has not been brought about to any considerable degree by 

 the farmers themselves. Whether in Egypt, China, India or America 

 the same is true The problems of the farm are so deep, so numerous 

 and so intricate, and the time of the farmer so thoroughly occupied 

 by a multiplicity of labors that it is next to impossible for him to 

 learn by trying untried methods. We realize now that the problems 

 of the farmer are as deep and mysterious as the problems of life. 

 The whole system of farming is the handling of life, animal life 

 and plant life and the juggling of one against the other. The poor 

 Hindoo farmer has been left to work out his own problems, with the 

 result that 72 per cent of the people of India are now what may 

 well be termed "peasant farmers," ignorant and poor, every few 

 years dying by the thousands, literally dying like animals by the 

 roadside, in such numbers that the living are not numerous and 

 strong enough to bury them. We are now learning to respect the 

 man who makes two pounds of bread stuffs grow where one grew 

 before, instead of doffing the hat to the millionaire who has suc- 

 ceeded in coaxing two dollars from a neighbor's pocket where only 

 one had been gotten before. 



We find in Russia at the present time a painfully interesting 

 Condition. The people as a whole are very poor and ignorant 

 beyond belief, and their methods of tilling the soil and harvesting 

 and threshing the crops are so crude, so expensive in labor, that 

 improvement is very slow. Plows made of the crotches of trees 

 and harrows of boughs, lashed together by willows with the stub 

 ends of the lateral branches left long to serve as teeth are used to 

 cover the grain. 



The nation is in debt, but the farmers can pay but little taxes, 

 because so poor. If the nation would only aid the people, begin- 

 ning with the producers and distributors of human necessities, to 

 become financially able to pay, and in gratitude willing to pay, then 

 not only could they meet the interest on foreign loans, but the 

 principal as well. 



In all the countries thus far mentioned, liberal, even extrava- 

 gant buildings of various public sort have been constructed. These 

 gorgeous temples and theaters serve to prove that the mind of the 

 Greek, the Russian and the Indian, has inventive, constructive 

 ability, but most of the constructive work has been done in the 

 wrong direction. It spent the energies of the people upon those 

 things that in turn produce nothing. If, instead, those few of 

 every period and country who possessed creative ability had de- 



