THE EVOLUTION OF THE MOVEMENT 183 



and applied would surely and immediately make him suc- 

 cessful, but one incapable of acquiring it himself. Natu- 

 rally, then, these persons saw in the county agent a means 

 of direct communication between the scientist and the 

 farmer, who would take to him the information that he 

 needed and show him how to use it. 



Again many of these persons in official Washington real- 

 ized that the government was paying a considerable part 

 of the county agent's salary in the early days, and they 

 quite plausibly expected that this entitled the Department 

 of Agriculture to control his activities. The franking privi- 

 lege or free use of the mails, which is extended to all county 

 agents through the Department, has proved to be a most 

 convenient and useful means of reminding county agents of 

 their connection with and their responsibility to the De- 

 partment. At the beginning of the work, before the enact- 

 ment of the Smith-Lever law, when the Department paid a 

 large share of the county agent's salary direct, its influence 

 in shaping the movement in the direction which it thought 

 it ought to go was proportionally larger than now when the 

 public's share of his salary is paid through the college. 

 At that time the federal government undoubtedly exerted 

 too large an influence for the permanent good of the move- 

 ment. 



But as the states through their agricultural college's, and 

 later the farmers through their county associations acquired 

 a larger share of control, particularly as the counties began 

 to pay a correspondingly larger proportion of the bills, their 

 local and more practical viewpoints helped to give a better 

 balance to the movement. Indeed, so far has this localizing 

 influence gone, that there are many who now feel that the 

 movement is now too much in the hands of farmers for its 

 own good and that of the Nation. But this is an extreme 



