736 AGRICULTURE 



questions. .The farmer is the conservative, not the dynamic element 

 of society. We live in a dynamic social age. 



The farmer always will be relatively conservative. His business is 

 rooted in the earth. In a thoroughly well-developed agriculture, the 

 farmer does not move his business rapidly from place to place. He 

 remains while others move on. Therefore is it especially necessary 

 that we extend to him all the essential benefits of our civilization. (I 

 hope he will not care for the unessential benefits.) He has the rural 

 free delivery of mails although this was thought to be impossible a 

 few years ago. Shall he not have a parcels post? Each year the good 

 roads movement, originating in the cities, is extending itself farther 

 into the real country. Trolley-lines are extending country ward; soon 

 they will come actually to serve the farmer's needs. The telephone, 

 as a separate rural enterprise, is extending itself. Extensional edu- 

 cational enterprises are reaching farther and farther into the open 

 farming districts. Cooperation and organization movements are at 

 the same time extending and concreting themselves. 



Farming stands for individualism as distinguished from collectiv- 

 ism. Farming enterprises will be more and more consolidated and 

 capitalized, but they can never be syndicated and monopolized to the 

 same extent as many other enterprises. How best to preserve and 

 direct this democratic individualism of the open country is one of the 

 greatest questions now confronting us. 



The art impulse will soon take hold of the country, as it has already 

 laid hold on the city. We have lived all these centuries on the assump- 

 tion that work of art is associated with buildings and "collections." 

 As nature is the source of all our art, so the time is coming when we 

 ' shall allow nature herself to express her full beauty and power. We 

 shall go to nature oftener than to art galleries. We shall first remove 

 objectionable features from the landscape features for which man 

 is responsible such as all untidiness and blemishes, all advertising 

 signs, all unharmonious buildings. Then we shall begin to work out 

 our enlarging aspirations with the natural material before us make 

 pictures with sward and trees and streams and hills, write our ideals 

 in the sweep of the landscape and the color of the flowers. Our " art " 

 societies still confine themselves to imitation art. The great art 

 societies will be those that give first attention to nature as it is, 

 and to human ideals expressed in nature, not only as it is repre- 

 sented to be in plastic materials and in paints. 



Of all the forces that shall revitalize and recrystallize the country, 

 the school is the chief. The schools make the opinions of the nation. 

 The city school has been developed, but the country school has been 

 relatively stationary; yet every farm family is interested in the school. 

 The farmer believes in schooling, just as completely as the city man 

 does; but he may not be convinced that the schools are really touch- 



