New York AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 41 
the general progress of the race. Our outlook must be forward 
rather than backward. We must overcome the influences of many 
phrases and trite statements that have long been public property. 
It is said that the farms are the bulwark of the nation. Like all 
trite sayings, this is both true and false. We need a conservative 
element of the farm, that has its feet planted directly on the verities 
of the earth. But we must remember that poor lands usually raise 
poor people. I do not conceive it to be necessary that all the lands 
in any commonwealth should support farm families in the sense in 
which we have understood it in the past. It is much better for 
the commonwealth, both from the economic and social points of 
view, that many of the lands should be devoted to forests or even 
allowed to run wild rather than to produce people that are only 
half alive. I should want to keep the conservatism of the agricul- 
tural peoples, but I should want this conservatism to be constructive 
and progressive. 
I am not ready to admit that the traditional “ independent ” farm 
family on 80 or 100 acres of land is necessarily essential, as we 
have been taught, to the maintenance of democratic institutions or 
to the best development of agriculture. The size of holdings and 
the relation of the family to the land, are likely to change radically 
in many regions, and we must be prepared to accept the fact. 
In the discussion of abandoned farms, I fear that we have been 
misled or even scared by a phrase. We have accepted the term 
“abandoned farms” as itself a statement of fact and have seemed 
to reason from it as if it presented a single condition of affairs. 
Our imagination has often outrun our reason. It is not so much 
a question of abandonment as of shifting occupancy and radically 
changed conditions. If these conditions had been expressed with 
equal emphasis by some other phrase, the discussion of the question 
might have taken a wholly different direction. Suppose, for ex- 
ample, that a part of the problem had been expressed in the term 
“farms becoming forested;”’ the least imaginative of my hearers 
will at once see that a wholly unlike line of thought might have 
evolved from the discussion and wholly different conclusions might 
have been reached. There is really no problem of abandoned farms 
as such. The so-called abandonment of farms does not represent 
one condition, but many conditions ; not one series of facts, but many 
series of facts; not one forthcoming result, but many results. The 
condition of agriculture, even though we admit it to be bad in 
many particulars, is not a cause for alarm, but is rather a reason 
