WANTED: A RURAL POLICY 87 



POLICIES BUT NO POLICY 



What, therefore, we have really done is to build 

 much machinery designed to aid agriculture, most of 

 it tremendously effective; but we have set it up without 

 much regard to unifying the enterprise of rural im- 

 provement, or even to securing cooperation in the ma- 

 chinery itself. We have, for example, the parts of a 

 perfectly enormous plan for agricultural education; 

 there is nothing comparable to it elsewhere in the world. 

 The statement frequently appears in print and is made 

 in fervid public addresses that the government has done 

 something for every interest but agriculture. It is not 

 true. Probably there is no country in the world which 

 has developed such a wide variety of voluntary col- 

 lective or associated efforts on behalf of agriculture and 

 country life as has our own. Their names are legion. 

 But in large measure each agency u does that which is 

 right in its own eyes." There is no agreement as to 

 what the rural problem really is or how to solve it. 

 There is no statement to be found anywhere clearly in- 

 dicating the real task of any one agency nor its relation 

 to the service of other agencies. There is no clean-cut 

 cooperation of available forces for definite purposes or 

 ends. Even in so well developed a part of our ma- 

 chinery as the established activities of agricultural edu- 

 cation, we may safely assert that we have no well 

 rounded policy. 



Perhaps the most serious feature of the situation is 

 the fact that so often we mistake the mill for the grist. 

 Most of the questions that arise in the extension service 

 of nation and state concern themselves with machinery 

 of operation rather than with true objectives. If you 

 ask the average agricultural college official for his 



