TRAINING FOR COUNTRY LIFE 41 



such animals. They treat them with kindness as a matter of course. 

 It never occurs to them to do otherwise. They know how to raise 

 and feed such animals and get them ready for the market. They 

 learn all the minutiae about crop-raising and grow up farmers and 

 connoisseurs of grain. 



The second effect, no less precious, has already been incidentally 

 referred to. Breeds of live stock and varieties of plants cultivated 

 have become greatly improved, and are from year to year becoming 

 more so. The number of live stock has substantially increased. 

 Cultivation becomes of a higher order, which means more profit to 

 the cultivator and more production, and therefore more profit to the 

 nation. Husbandry becomes a different thing altogether, and 

 " country life " becomes a different thing, too, with more " rural 

 atmosphere " in the souls of the people devoted to it. Surely this 

 benefit is well worth the trouble and money bestowed upon it. 



In the third place, there is the effect, likewise already referred to, 

 in the passage quoted above from the Year Book of the American 

 Department of Agriculture, and about which more will have to be 

 said in the succeeding chapter. Through their boys and girls the 

 parents, stubborn and refractory stuff that they are, come to be 

 impregnated with knowledge. What the county agent cannot instil 

 into them, what their intellect refuses to absorb from books and 

 pamphlets, the example of their children almost forces upon them 

 and makes them take in. 



The lesson to be derived from all this plainly is, that young rural 

 folk, to remain " rural " in temperament, and to become fit and 

 proper cultivators of the soil — which obviously is what we wish to 

 make them — want, not only to be taken in hand early and indi- 

 vidually, the individual child being taught according to its personal 

 qualities and aptitudes, lest, as the Latin proverb has it, the 

 donkey be fed upon bones and the dog upon chaff ; but further- 

 more, that the rural child's mind wants to be fed with rural pabulum, 

 having its attention forcibly directed to things which it sees around 

 it, and to processes going on in connection with them, and lessons 

 drawn from them which explain those things and processes, and 

 familiarise it all the more with such ; and, lastly, that the rural 

 child, to grow up caring for the country and its occupations, and 

 to become disposed to spend its life amid such occupations in the 

 country, wants to be taught what it is intended that it should learn, 

 by being made to do it, being shown how to do it, and informed why 

 it is to be done in that way. It is not the book, not the master's 

 desk, not the blackboard with its chalked figures, that is wanted so 



