SKETCH OF MODERN AGRICULTURE 1 1 5 



This is a situation which contains possibilities of evil in the 

 form of separating our rural population into two groups, the 

 landowners and the landless. Such a separation of classes has 

 never failed in the history of the world to breed jealousies and 

 animosities. It is not improbable that immigration, if the tide 

 should again turn toward the country instead of toward the city, 

 will still further accentuate the evil by placing in the country 

 districts a landless class, by reducing wages through the in- 

 crease in the number of laborers, and by making it therefore 

 still more difficult for the landless man to become a landowner. 

 Agricultural education. Contemporaneously with the in- 

 creased activity of the experiment stations, there has developed 

 an increased appreciation of the value of agricultural education. 

 A certain humorist has said that agriculture has tended to be- 

 come a sedentary occupation. This, of course, is an exaggera- 

 tion, but it is not too much to say that it is becoming a learned 

 profession. To be a scientific farmer requires an education com- 

 parable in breadth and thoroughness with that of the engineer or 

 the physician, and probably much more thorough than that of 

 the lawyer or the preacher. Moreover, the enlarged use of 

 machinery has freed the farmer and his family from a great deal 

 of the drudgery and severe muscular labor to which they were 

 subject at a time so recent as to be well remembered by many 

 farmers now living. The transference from the farm to the 

 creamery and cheese factory of the labor of manufacturing prod- 

 ucts of the dairy has effected a revolution of the work within the 

 farm household, and has so lightened farm work that there 

 is little except the isolation of farm life to hinder the enjoyment 

 of r c\ culture and refinement equal to that of the business and 

 proiessional classes of the cities. In very recent years this 

 isolation is being remedied by a variety of factors, chief among 

 which is the rural telephone. Rural free delivery of mails, the 

 improvements of roads, and, in the case of the more prosperous 



