i08 STATE BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. 



communities the fact of extremely small churches, of great conservatism 

 in the pews, of extremely small salaries for pastors, and of sectarian 

 jealousy and discord. Real rural progress can come only when these 

 various social agencies begin to do the work that is possible for them 

 to do, and begin to receive the enthusiastic support of the great mass of 

 farmers that they ought to receive. 



In the third place, it is necessary to get firmer hold of the idea that no 

 pne of these agencies is suiBQcient. We must have a movement of the 

 army all along the line. We must have a campaign for rural progress 

 that involves the forward movement of every phase of rural development. 

 And while as individuals our chief interests may be with the farmers' 

 organization, or with the country school, or with some form of agri- 

 cultural education, or with the country church, or with the development 

 of some phase of rural communication, or with the economic problems of 

 marketing, it is nevertheless important that we shall appreciate the fact 

 that we are working at but a section of the question, that we are but a 

 division of the army and that there is no one patent medicine that will 

 cure the ills that our agriculture may be heir to. 



We ought now to be in condition of mind to appreciate the opportunity 

 that there is for securing co-operation of all these forces, to believe that 

 it is perfectly legitimate for people who are not farmers to have an in- 

 terest in this question, to see that not only must the farmers help them- 

 selves, but that they can and should profit by the services of their teacher, 

 of their pastor, of their editor, and even of city people. There is no reason 

 why joint meetings of all these classes may not be of value. There is no 

 reason why the farmer should resent proper interest on the part of these 

 classes. We cannot, for example, have the right kind of rural school until 

 we have a body of rural teachers who see beyond the four walls of their 

 school room, — the rural teacher must have an intelligent sympathy with 

 the problems of the farm. The same thing is true of the editor of the 

 country paper ; of the pastor of the rural church ; and of the professor in 

 our agricultural college. 



There is involved in this discussion a more important question than 

 any I have yet suggested. It can merely be referred to. The real prob- 

 lem in our agriculture is whether the type of independent American 

 farmer can be preserved. The "American farmer" as he may be called, 

 is distinctly a middle-class man. Now in our rapid social and industrial 

 changes is he going to maintain himself as a middle-class man, as a yeo- 

 man; is he going to be able to own his own land, to be a capitalist as 

 well as a laborer, to have a fairly high standard of living, to be able to 

 educate his family, to do his own thinking? Or is the tiller of the soil 

 in the future America, going to sink back to the position which the tiller 

 of the soil has almost without exception maintained in the history of the 

 world, and from which he has emerged only occasionally, as for instance 

 when he reached the American continent? This is the fundamental ques- 

 tion, and my proposition is that the only way of assuring the perma- 

 nence of the "American farmer" is that there shall be a union of all those 

 people, and of all those agencies that can possibly be of any benefit to 

 the farmer in a campaign for rural progress. 



