EDUCATION. 153 



nately developing some very undesirable propensities and 

 habits — the use of credit, and so fitted them for the intro- 

 duction of that co-operative credit, for the practice of which 

 Lord Cromer has owned to me that he did not in his day 

 consider the country population yet fully ripe, but which 

 is now, as I understand, to be introduced. In the same way 

 Indian Government officers have had to press their takkavi 

 loans upon scarcely willing rayats, so preparing them, by a 

 practice which in itself is far from perfect, for the more 

 educating employment of co-operative credit, which is 

 now working such wonders in our great Eastern dependency. 

 It is the same thing with our education. We are pressing 

 upon our rural population a commodity in which they " do 

 not believe." We are asking them to take our goods " on 

 approval." We know that what is wanted is what an 

 expert American of authority, Mr. H. J. Waters, President 

 of the Kansas State College of Agriculture, has called " a 

 veritable campaign of Education." And so, if we would 

 have the result, we must not grudge the means required 

 to produce it. We spend from £19,000 to £95,000 (the 

 latter sum includes £61,699 from the Development Fund 

 for the particular year) of public money a year upon our 

 Agricultural Education. The figure for 1910 was £19,265, 

 Prussia in that year spent five times that amount on its 

 agricultural High Colleges alone. The United States spend — 

 on Education and Research — fully £2,000,000 ($10,000, 000). ^ 

 The money is not thrown away. A canny Scot from 

 Ayrshire was, about 1896, placed at the head of the Depart- 

 ment, to set the " campaign " a-going. Listen to what he 

 reported in 1908, after twelve years of hard work — which 

 has since been as energetically continued by himself and 

 his successor : 



"The period has developed an amazing and unexampled 

 prosperity for the farmer. His improving financial condition 

 has been both an effect and a cause — an effect partly of his own 



S efforts, joined to those of public agencies ; and also the means 



of making his life and the lives of his wife and children better 



^ The total vote for the Federal Department of Agriculture in 

 the past year was $138,180,030 (over £27,000,000). 



