INTRODUCTION 15 



some part in shaping. By the same token, our purpose in elaborating 

 an economics of agriculture is to train the agriculturist in the business 

 principles which govern the commercial success or failure of his enter- 

 prise, but not less to enable him, and likewise those others who are not 

 engaged in agriculture, to perceive the economic results which will 

 flow from one sort of agricultural organization or another, from one 

 sort or another of consumption of our resources of land, labor, and 

 capital. 



For the college of agriculture there should be, by way of founda- 

 tion, a general elementary course covering the fundamental principles 

 of economic theory. The elementary course in economics as pre- 

 sented in most American colleges and universities today has been 

 pretty well standardized: this same general subject-matter is well 

 suited, by merely substituting the facts of agriculture, to point the 

 morals and adorn the tale, to furnish the content of the basal year in 

 agricultural economics, leaving to subsequent courses the more 

 detailed treatment of special phases of the subject. An examination 

 of textbooks and college announcements seems to indicate that at 

 present most courses begin with a rather detailed study of production 

 (now often including marketing) and, except for the many who stop 

 with that, leap over to a fragmentary discussion of distribution as 

 touching the farmer's profits. But this is no adequate preparation 

 for meeting the more intricate problems facing modern agriculture. 

 The student, besides examining the economic factors in technical 

 productive efficiency, needs to understand the laws of value and the 

 process by which physical units of product are fitted to psychic units *? 

 of want through the agency of an exchange mechanism; he needs to ' 

 consider, not only how this aggregate lump of values is broken up into 

 private incomes, but how the use of this wealth in private hands reacts 

 upon the further operation of the system. Even when for practical 

 reasons the course in agricultural economics must' be much com- 

 pacted, it should be reduced to a stout framework of fundamental 

 principles instead of bloating into a flabby mass of descriptive gen- 

 eralities. The sea of print inundates the country as well as the city 

 today, and the young man who goes out from the agricultural college 

 will have presented to him more than enough plans and projects and 

 suggestions concerning the conduct of his business. Our best service 

 is in training him so that he will think clearly and choose wisely, to 

 enable him to distinguish between alluring promise and innate possi- 

 bility of performance. 



