NEED OF OKGANISATION 93 



only in a very restricted measure. Hence the dissatisfaction pre- 

 vailing in our rural districts ; and hence that steady flow of the 

 population from country to town, which all profess to deplore, 

 though there are a good many who do not appear concerned about 

 mending matters. " To improve our system of agriculture," so 

 Mr. Roosevelt goes on, " seems to me the most urgent of the tasks 

 which lie before us. But it cannot, in my judgment, be effected by 

 measures that touch only the material and technical side of the 

 subject ; the whole business and life of the farmer must also be 

 taken into account. . . . Our object should be to help develop in 

 the country community the great ideals of community life, as well as 

 of personal character. . . . Everything resolves itself in the end into 

 a question of personality." " The most important impress this 

 conference can make upon the farmer himself, as well as the 

 country," so said Mr. B. F. Harris, already quoted, at the first 

 Marketing and Farm Credits Congress held in the United States, 

 " is that above all things we are working for a bigger, better, fuller 

 country life — for a rural civilisation such as the world has not seen — 

 to build anew and broadly upon the bedrock of agriculture." 



These words apply to ourselves with almost greater force than 

 they do to the people to whom they were originally addressed, 

 because, although Mr. Roosevelt had to do with a country in which 

 it might almost be said that organisation was totally wanting in our 

 present sense, whereas we have here a sort of rural organisation 

 handed down to us from times now pretty ancient, our organisation — 

 unfortunately rather firmly rooted in the soil and difficult either to 

 abolish or to correct — has shown itself lamentably out of harmony 

 with the present time, and we shall have a deal of stubbing to do 

 before we can proceed to new planting. Nevertheless the task must 

 be taken in hand, or the decay already pronounced, generally 

 acknowledged and deplored, must infallibly proceed further. 



What all concerned with the advancement of agriculture in this 

 country will have to turn their attention to is, not the comfortable 

 farmers with their 200, 500 or 2,000 acres apiece, who, if they are 

 even only tolerable men of business, are sure to enjoy already a fair 

 standard of life, with all attainable comforts and pleasures open to 

 them, but the small men with whom we are now earnestly endeavour- 

 ing to people our country, in a social and generally economic, even 

 more than in a purely vocational, aspect. Unmistakably, without 

 any prospect or desire to see the large farmers rooted out — they are 

 necessary at certain points and in a certain proportion — the future 

 of rural economy belongs mainly to the small men. And our object in 



