RURAL COOPERATION 



Cooperation discovers latent talent. The greatest resources 

 of the nation are of a spiritual character. Rural America is 

 rich beyond the dreams of avarice in talents of a high order, 

 and let these talents be sought with the eagerness with which 

 men seek gold, and let them under the direction of leader- 

 ship be put through the refiner's fire, and they will emerge 

 from the crucible pure gold. It was never meant that man 

 should give the best strength of his life to the sordid activities 

 of acquiring the valuable material things of earth, and yet 

 all through the ages man has been sacrificing health and 

 strength and honor and friendship and love, yea life itself, 

 on the altar of temporal gain, while great stores of un- 

 developed human riches, riches that are not temporal but 

 eternal, are accessible to all. What a wonderful difference 

 between the riches that have permanent significance and those 

 that are temporal and perish with earth! The nugget of 

 gold that the miner finds is almost as valuable as the gold 

 eagle of the same weight. But the undeveloped talent is 

 as naught compared with the same talent transformed into 

 an efficient instrument, ready for service. Holden, the Corn 

 King, loved everywhere in the Corn Belt and possibly as 

 widely known today as any other living agriculturist, achieved 

 his great reputation largely through his work in Iowa, where 

 the corn yield of the state was increased several bushels per 

 acre through his efforts in the matter of seed selection. 

 Holden was a poor boy on a farm like thousands of other 

 poor boys on farms, but his God-given talent was developed, 

 and today not only Iowa but the whole nation is richer 

 because of his developed talent. How tremendously more 

 valuable is this developed talent that lay dormant in the mind 

 of the barefoot boy on his father's farm a generation ago ! 

 " What the world needs is men who can do to agriculture 

 and horticulture what Edison did to electricity, Carnegie to 

 steel and Vanderbilt to transportation develop its effi- 

 ciency." 1 Today the talent to do these wonderful things lies 



1 The Ohio Journal of Commerce. 



145 



