EIGHTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK-PART X. 515 



value. They seek to provide for the people on the farms an equipment 

 so broad and thorough as to fit them for the highest requirements of our 

 citizenship; so that they can establish and maintain country homes of 

 the best type, and create and sustain a country civilization more than 

 equal to that of the city. The men they train must be able to meet 

 the strongest business competition, at home or abroad, and they can do 

 this only if they are trained, not alone in the various lines of husbandry, 

 but in successful economic management. These colleges, like the state 

 experiment stations, should carefully study and make known the needs 

 of each section, and should try to provide remedies for what is wrong. 



The education to be obtained in these colleges should create as inti- 

 mate relationship as is possible between the theory of learning and the 

 facts of actual life. Educational establishments should produce highly 

 trained scholars, of course; but in a country like ours, where the educa- 

 tional establishments are so numerous, it is folly to think that their main 

 purpose is to produce these highly trained scholars. Without in the least 

 disparaging scholarship and learning — on the contrary, while giving hearty 

 and ungrudging admiration and support to the comparatively few whose 

 primary work should be creative scholarship — it must be remembered that 

 the ordinary graduate of our colleges should be and must be, primarily, a 

 man and not a scholar. Education should not confine itself to books. 

 It must train executive power, and try to create that right public opinion 

 which is the most potent factor in the proper solution of all political and 

 social questions. Book-learning is very important, but it is by no means 

 everything; and we shall never get the right idea of education until we 

 definitely understand that a man may be well trained in book-learning 

 and yet, in the proper sense of the word, and for all practical purposes, be 

 utterly uneducated; while a man of comparatively little book-learning 

 may, nevertheless, in essentials have a good education. 



IMPROVEJIENT OP CONDITIONS AFFECTING COUNTRY LIFE. 



It is true that agriculture in the United States has reached a very 

 high level of prosperity; but we can not afford to disregard the signs 

 which teach us that there are influences operating against the establish- 

 ment or retention of our country life upon a really sound basis. The 

 overextensive and wasteful cultivation of pioneer days must stop and 

 give place to a more economical system. Not only the physical but 

 the ethical needs of the people of the country districts must be con- 

 sidered. In our country life there must be social and intellectual ad- 

 vantages as well as a fair standard of physical comfort. There must 

 be in the country, as in the town, a multiplication of movements for 

 intellectual advancement and social betterment. We must try to raise 

 the average of farm life, and we must also try to develop it so that it 

 shall offer exceptional chances for the exceptional man. 



Of course the essential things after all are those which concern all of 

 us as men and women, no matter whether we live in the town or the 

 country, and no matter what our occupations may be. The root prob- 

 lems are much the same for all of us, widely though they may differ in 

 outward manifestation. The most important conditions that tell for 

 happiness within the home are the same for the town and the country; 



