industries. There was no seeming necessity for educating farmers 

 for their life-work ; food was cheap enough and good enough. A 

 change has come. Production does not increase as fast as popula- 

 tion. Prices go up; it costs more to pay carriers, dealers, manufac- 

 turers, all classes. The farmer gets big prices now, but it costs him 

 twice as much to grow things as it did ten years ago. The fact the 

 population increases faster than food sets us thinking. We cannot 

 afford to buy food from foreign countries. The balances of trade 

 for goods bought and sold since the Civil War, independent of farm 

 products, have been heavily against us during that time, and have 

 been paid by exports from the farm. 



"If the factory and the shop are to sell abroad to square accounts 

 without a farm surplus, they must produce cheap enough to compete 

 with shop and factory abroad. It will be a new day when we have 

 to do that, if ever, and we shall have new subjects to talk about 

 unheard of in our land. Some farseeing men say this condition is 

 not far distant. I have not yet given up hope of preventing it. The 

 major part of our people in the East are being fed from the Mis- 

 sissippi Valley, and the States of the South draw much from the 

 same source. I am well satisfied that the soils of that valley are 

 being subjected gradually to the same unwise treatment that so seri- 

 ously reduced the soils east of the Alleghenies and south of the Ohio 

 River. 



"For the last half century the young people of the farms have 

 been educated to leave them. No teacher until recently taught a 

 scholar to make more of his day's work on the farm, nor how to 

 make the acre respond better and for a very good 1 reason. The 

 teacher had never learned himself. Education flows downward from 

 the university regarding everything but agriculture. If applied science 

 along this line is not understood at the fountainhead there will be no 

 stream at which to drink. The necessity of educating the farmer is im- 

 pressed upon our people and steps are being taken in all our States 

 and Territories to this end. Sciences are being applied and research 

 made into causes and results. Education is being extended into pri- 

 mary schools in the principal States. Federal and State governments 

 are spending money freely for this purpose and students are multi- 

 plying. The results of research are being printed, and the literature 

 of the farm is growing. The Department of Agriculture sent out 

 to the people 18,000,000 pieces of printed matter last year relating 

 to the farm and the home. 



