088 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



not entered. To give us the know how is the aim of our stations. They 

 are continually sending out valuable reports and statistics. They try 

 new varieties and we get the benefit. They tell us how to raise calves on 

 skim milk, and yet not have skim milk calves — how to fatten the steer 

 and the hog — in fact they are continually giving us the benefit of every- 

 thing in the line of progressive agriculture. 



A few years ago, Ames was looked upon as an inferior school — today 

 she is second to none. The names of her president and professors are 

 familiar to all who read agricultural papers. Her reputation is national. 

 Her two weeks' course in grain and stock judging the past winter was 

 commented on far and near. Over four hundred men of all ages, and from 

 all over the state and many from outside the state as well, assembled 

 each morning at six o'clock and studied until nine thirty in the afternoon, 

 with only intermissions for meals. All seemed anxious to learn, from the 

 gray haired farmer, whose education was obtained mainly in the rugged 

 school of experience to the younger and more polished graduates of our 

 best schools and colleges and universities. Never before did a like class 

 have such an opportunity for up-to-date work. Proud of our agricultural 

 college? Words cannot express it. 



Lives there a man with soul so dead 



Who never to himself hath said, 



"This is our own loved Iowa's school?" 



Do our boys practice what they learn? Some do and some do not. I 

 am intimately acquainted with a young man who is attending one of these 

 agricultural colleges. Last summer he spent his summer vacation at 

 home. Could you have visited him, you would have seen a few acres of 

 speltz, a little rape, a patch of bromus, part of an acre of mangles and 

 various other varieties with which he was experimenting. In fly time 

 you would have seen him going among the Short-horns applying a mixture 

 that served to give the animals relief from their enemies. He did their 

 welding. All his father's discarded saws were filed and put in order. A 

 year ago, he paid his own expenses to fat stock show — this year, he was re- 

 quested to go at station's expense to care for the cattle. In buying stock 

 he is ever urging his father to get better. Progress is one of the many 

 things taught at these valuable schools. 



But I must hasten and dwell for a moment upon our own district 

 schools. The little white — not red — school house, still stands on the hill, 

 but how much more beautiful and attractive than twenty or thirty years 

 ago. Not so well filled as formerly but so much better equipped, with 

 their pictures, libraries and organs. 



I look with dread and dismal forebodings upon any attempt to dis- 

 enthrone these inspirers of our youth, these promoters of our peace, these 

 guardians of our liberty. Do not statistics show that the majority of 

 our best and ablest men started their school lives in these same little 

 country schools? Is not one of the great objects for living in the country 

 that our children may not mingle in great masses where there is sure to 

 be much of impurity and depravity? Is not childhood better off in the 



