284 Missouri Agricidtural Report. 



in the old country. Take a farmer in any of the European coun- 

 tries and he is looked upon as the highest man in the country — the 

 leader of the community, but here he is ridiculed by the city people. 

 So, largely because of this, our high tide of immigration has been 

 turned from the open fields into the great city. In these cities 

 m.any have fallen into awful vices and temptations, sometimes be- 

 cause they have not been warned against them or because they have 

 not been properly prepared. We will continue to have such con- 

 ditions until there are more meetings of this kind, until churches 

 and schools join in conferences and demonstrations such as this 

 Farmers' Week. Then may we hope for agricultural interests to 

 prosper and the country to be a place of broad vision and noble 

 living. 



Just a few words about the condition of the country church 

 today. I have already indicated some of the symptoms. But thank 

 God, the country church is not deserting the field. Though every 

 other institution, the country store, the country physician, and the 

 country factory, has deserted the country, the church is still there. 

 Perhaps the country factory was there by the crossroads where 

 they made some wagons and some plows. I remember in Northern 

 Ohio not more than fifty houses clustered around a little village, but 

 there was a little factory, two little factories, in fact, where in- 

 dustrious men who did not have work all the year on the farm could 

 find employment in the winter. There was a little country store. 

 There was community interest — a debating society, a literary 

 society, a singing school, and all those delightful social functions 

 that drew us together and made us one. That is all over. I went 

 back to that community just a few years ago and those factories 

 and stores were closed, and the people were getting their goods 

 from mail order houses in the big cities. 



The trouble with us is that the church has been starved. The 

 country church is doing more for the uplift of our race, for the 

 money invested in it, than any other institution in the world. You 

 have permitted your ministers to be neglected and half-starved, you 

 have not looked after them with the same care and attention that 

 you have other institutions in which you are interested. I come 

 from Illinois, one of the richest states in the world, agriculturally, 

 I believe. There, $425 an acre was refused for an 80-acre tract of 

 land. That is going some, when we talk of farm values. Do you 

 know what we paid our preachers in that section, in the 225 

 churches that I visited two years ago? We paid the miserable sum 



