72 



will later be shown that corn was thus saved in twenty counties in 1914 

 to a value of more than $700,000, by measures costing the farmers 

 about $40,000. including under this head both materials purchased 

 and the value of the labor of the farmer and his hired man. It is 

 certainly safe to say that other defensive operations of this and other 

 years added at least $300,000 to these savings, or that, in other words, 

 at least another million dollars' worth of crops would have been 

 destroyed if the farmers had left them wholly without defense. 



It is the object of this paper to present a sufficiently detailed ac- 

 count of our recent chinch-bug outbreak to show its causes and those 

 of its disappearance, to compare the cost and outcome of the various 

 defensive measures brought into use, and especially to show the prob- 

 able result if all concerned had made a general and energetic use of 

 the best of these measures from the very beginning of the trouble. It 

 will appear from this discussion that it is not only perfectly feasible 

 to protect the corn crop completely in the beginning and early stages 

 of a chinch-bug uprising, but that this is an immensely profitable un- 

 dertaking ; that by a thoro application of measures now well known, so 

 large a proportion of the chinch-bugs in any badly infested area might 

 be destroyed at this time that a developing outbreak would be prac- 

 tically suppressed, to the great advantage of the local community and 

 the substantial protection of a much larger territory adjacent. This 

 would require, however, general cooperative action, taken in the com- 

 munity interest as well as in that of each person whose crops are 

 threatened at the time. Unfortunately, however, the individual farm- 

 er will commonly stop short w T ith the best protection which he can 

 afford his own crops, to the neglect of the further measures necessary 

 to the protection of those of his neighbors and to the protection later, 

 perhaps, of those of a great area exposed to destruction if an out- 

 break is allowed full swing. Such an outbreak is like a contagious 

 disease or a conflagration; if wholly left to individual control, 

 it will run its course, with only a little saved from destruc- 

 tion here and there, by special personal effort. If the commun- 

 ity is to be protected it must be enabled to act in its own behalf 

 through its official representatives, equipped and empowered to en- 

 courage, assist, and, where necessary, to require and even compel indi- 

 vidual action which will make the community interest safe. 



Detailed Computation of Losses 



For a critical judgment of the amounts and values of the loss of 

 farm crops caused by the late chinch-bug outbreak, I have first taken 

 the statistics of production for 1914, the year in which chinch-bug in- 

 jury was the most extensive and most severe, and have chosen for com- 

 parison the seventeen counties worst infested and seventeen other 

 counties adjacent to them which were so little infested, if at all, that 

 no appreciable injury was done to crops. The seventeen infested 



