Report of Missouri Farmers' Week. 387 



the heart in the work we were buoyed up with the feeling that we 

 were doing just as noble work as was the fellow in the counting- 

 house or factory. We felt just as big as the dandy on the corner, 

 with his white hands, his $50 tailor-made suit and his 10-cent 

 bank account. All that was essential to success was good judg- 

 ment, a backbone as strong as the eternal hills and a desire for 

 something better. Here, as elsewhere, fortune is not the blind, 

 irresponsible dame she is sometimes called. She rewards pluck, 

 perseverance, energy and common sense. She does not ask a man 

 who his father was, or if he came over in the Mayflower. She asks : 

 are you patient, can you work, can you give up wearing good 

 clothes, can you put on a mud-bespattered shirt and a pair of high- 

 topped rubber boots? If he answers "yes," she proceeds to test 

 him. She lets the rain beat upon him at his work, she lets the sun 

 wither his pastures and the winter's cold shrink his yield of milk, 

 and then, if he makes good, she rewards him a thousandfold. 



THE COMMERCIAL IMPORTANCE OF THE DAIRY INDUSTRY. 



(C. W. Kent, Kansas City.) 



A few years ago this country became very much excited over 

 the subject of free and unlimited coinage of silver. In fact, so 

 much so that many good men were somewhat doubtful as to whether 

 the country could continue to exist if this subject were not disposed 

 of in the proper way. 



But really, the importance of the situation was greatly over- 

 estimated. The entire production of silver for the past sixteen 

 years, or from the time of its spectacular entrance into American 

 politics to the present time, would amount to less than three-fourths 

 of the dairy crop of 1912, while jf we take last year's production of 

 silver, it is so insignificant in comparison with our business as to 

 be almost unnoticeable ; yet the daily papers have much to say 

 about our gold and silver output. The fact of the matter is that 

 the total production of silver in the United States in 1912 was less 

 than one-half the value of the dairy products of either Iowa, Illinois, 

 Minnesota or Wisconsin, for the same period. Gold is something 

 with which most of us have little acquaintance, but its production 

 in 1912 amounts to only ten per cent more than the dairy products 

 of any of the above-named states in 1912. Yet the slightest de- 

 crease in the production of the metals is sufficient to obtain con- 

 siderable mention in our daily press. 



