682 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



for reading. Let me read you what Col. Woods says to farmers. All stock 

 men know of Col. Woods. "Mr. Farmer, let me advise you. I speak from 

 experience. I have endured poverty, hard times and calamities unnec- 

 essary to mention here. I have seen the time that a copper cent seemed 

 more valuable to me and I would guard it with more care than I would 

 today a five-pound chunk of gold. I say, let me advise you to halt in your 

 mad race for gold and take a little time for reading, recreation and en- 

 joyment. You have only one life to live, and when you die, you will stay 

 dead a long time. I was fifty years old before I thought I could afford p 

 vacation, but I made a mistake. I can see it now. Go slower and live 

 longer and you will take just as much cash with you when you die." 



Possibly some of us don't care for reading. If so let me urge you to 

 encourage your children to read. Have the magazines in the home for 

 their benefit. In so many homes, sometimes before the evening work is 

 all done, we find the boys with their horses already saddled to go to town 

 to spend the evening and sometimes part of the night at the village stores 

 listening to and participating in all sorts of village gossip. Let us educate 

 our children for something better than this; so that the next generation 

 of farmers may rank high in ability, thought and life. 



We will not educate them to leave the farm, but to love the farm — to 

 make farm life the best of all lives and the vocation of farming superior to 

 what it now is, and thus truly a desirable vocation. The time is past when 

 people feel sorry for the farmer. A drive out through any of the townships, 

 with their fine barns and commodious even elegant homes, with all modern 

 conveniences will convince anyone he is wasting his sympathy when he 

 pities the farmer. 



Of all classes of people a farmer needs a liberal education — because 

 the pursuit of farming covers such a wide range — biology, the care of the 

 animals he has around him — botany, horticulture, chemistry and meteor- 

 ology. He must know the use of machinery, hence a knowledge of me- 

 chanics. He buys and sells and needs also to understand finance. How 

 useful, how indispensable is a knowledge of all these to the successful 

 farmer! People used to think, no need of a farmer's son going farther 

 than the district school (unless he meant to be a professional man of some 

 sort) and to claim that education made a boy dissatisfied with farm life. 

 But now from the present advanced standpoint of the farmer in the light 

 which the progress of the last century has thrown around us, with our 

 free mail delivery and our telephones bringing us into touch with the great 

 world around us, we feel and know that those ideas were wrong. The 

 more thorough an education the child has, the broader his life view — 

 the happier he is because he sees more in nature and greater possibilities 

 in his work and he is contented. He is able to reason intelligently from 

 cause to effect (very necessary on a farm) and will be able to make a 

 grand success in his life; to exert an uplifting influence in all questions 

 of the day, civic and politic. Let us read then with these ends in view, 

 to keep abreast of the times and to be able to lead our children ever to 

 higher and nobler fields of life. 



