654 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



look down ou the farmer. Many farmers with a retaliatory iustiuct 

 consider airships, in their present stage of development, suitable carriers 

 of such jesters. But happily the great classes that constitute our com- 

 plex society are becoming better acquainted with one another, with the 

 result that the ideal of social brotherhood seems closer or larger as 

 the years unfold. 



State fairs and live stock expositions are strong factors in multiply- 

 ing the contacts, broadening the interests, enlarging the sympathies and 

 stimulating the sense of unity of the rural and urban citizens who on 

 these occasions are thrown together with a sort of rude good nature. 

 We must crawl over the edge of our little individual worlds in order to 

 see what is doing in other and larger worlds. In these interchanges 

 of personalities and ideas individuals are benefited in many ways and 

 the world as a whole grows better. This is the way we have got to make 

 the world better. 



Often it happens that the man who regularly attends his state fair 

 with the special object of profiting himself, gives more in help and en- 

 couragement than he receives. Staying at home can become as bad a 

 habit as farming by telephone. Our gregarious instincts are not to be 

 disregarded. It is good that country and city folk should commingle 

 and hobnob as at state fairs. Orderly mixtures of people moved by 

 purpose, curiosity and imitation represent humanity in an upward flow. 

 It is when people begin to recoil from one another, when class avoids 

 and detests other classes, that the course is toward dangerous ends. 



Our fairs are more than exhibits of material things; they are more 

 than instructive comparisons or schools of flowered experience. Under 

 the eye that sees deeply they are notches on the scale that measures 

 the progress of mankind toward a higher and larger life. Improvement 

 in animals and plants is the effect of improvement in men. Better 

 crops and better animals are the offspring of more thought on the part 

 of the producer. It is safe to judge men by their works. And good 

 works react favorably on those of humbler authorship. A superior 

 pure-bred bull, stallion, boar or ram is of itself an eloquent lecture on 

 good live stock. Let no one believe that the uninitiated eye of the man 

 who raises mongrels cannot see the greater merit and beauty of credit- 

 able pure-breds. 



Any man who makes fair use of hs opportunities at a cornbelt state 

 fair will see and hear things that will creep into his practices and help 

 in unnumbered ways. Thoughts and ideas gleaned on a teeming f?ir 

 grounds will work into a man's consciousness and later prompt or direct 

 an act of wisdom. It is not necessary for us to understand how we are 

 benefited in these subtle ways. Our business as a people seeking better 

 things in agriculture and in life is to give ourselves a chance to see 

 and hear where the spread of gcod and useful things is rich and where 

 the din of education, suggestion and inspiration is as a trumpet blast. 

 Optical instruction fairly overwhelms a modern state fair grounds, 

 and the opportunity of the ear for acquiring knowledge amounts to a 

 rich privilege. 



