ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



263 



in the country, while there is crowding and poverty and strife and 

 strikes in the city, for lack of living employment. 



A few years ago there was a great strike in Chicago. I do not now 

 remember just what precipitated it — no matter, at bottom the cause of all 

 strikes is too many people needing the same job. During this particu- 

 lar strike the storm for a while centered about some grain elevators. 

 Thousands of men threatened to pull down the elevators and help them- 

 selves to the wheat. At that tim e the elevators wer© filled with the 

 cheapest wheat that was ever raised in the world; but there were so many 

 people in Chicago who had no business there — no living business — that 

 they could not all earn enough to eat of the cheapest bread the world 

 ever had. 



This pulling away from the farms could not affect every other co'n- 

 dition and institution and leave our great institution, our school, un- 

 affected. And what a country of echoois is tliisi! Who can count our 

 schools? They are like the stars which no man can number. 



But our schoolsi, big, little, and medium, public and private, have 

 been dominated in their organization and in their teaching by this same 

 anything but farming spirit. 



They have taught our farmers' boys and girls about everything under 

 the sun except those very things they need and must know to make their 

 work and business attractive, satisfying, successful. 



The attitude of the schools toward agriculture has been something: 

 like this: Anybody can farm. You do not have to learn how to farm. 

 You just know it without having to learn. There is not much to learm 

 about it, anyway. There is no sc ience, no art about 'farm^jing. You do- 

 not go to school to learn how to farm better, you do not have to. You go> 

 to school to! learn how to do something else, so you may not have to farm.. 

 Only those people who cannot do something else, work at farming. 

 Strange! All this is passing strange, since if we but think for a moment 

 we know that had it not been for the farming which went before them 

 never a book would have been written, never a schoolhouse built on the 

 earth. Agriculture is the science of sciences, the art of arts. 



