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quire. The membership should be restricted to persons over 14 
years of age and should not as a rule include those over 18 or 19 
years. 
While attendance upon the institutes is of necessity voluntary, 
yet it is important to effect, as early as practicable, an organization 
in each locality composed of a membership that can be depended 
upon to attend the meetings and to assist in carrying on the work. 
To accomplish this it will be necessary to secure pledges from 
as many as possible to a form of constitution that embodies these 
obligations. 
Interest in institutes for young people should not be limited to 
farmers. The support of business, professional, and pubHc- 
spirited men generally is necessary to make the movement a suc- 
cess, and this support is more likely to be given if the institutes 
are planned to include town as well as country boys and girls. 
Merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, and tradesmen should be 
invited to assist. 
Every young people's institute organization should be provided 
with a library of reference consisting, along with books of general 
reading, of bulletins, pamphlets, and other books by recognized 
authorities upon agriculture and domestic science. This library 
should be in charge of the county institute and be available for 
use by all young people belonging to the institute organization of 
that county. 
The farmers' institute can materially assist in inaugurating the 
movement for the introduction of agriculture into the public 
schools by giving information to teachers, county superintendents 
and parents respecting this kind of work, and may go to the ex- 
tent of organizing and conducting clubs as samples of what the 
schools should do in this direction. As soon as the institute has 
organized such a club and has succeeded in interesting a group of 
children of school age and their teachers in contest work, it should 
turn it over to the school authorities for further attention and 
control. Children, therefore, of school age ( 10 to 14 years) should 
be committed to the school authorities for agricultural club work 
during the period of their connection with the school. After 
leaving school, the farmers' institute for young people can take 
charge and give them the special vocational training that they 
need to become proficient in the practical operations of the farm. 
Hitherto the farmers' institute has devoted its energies almost 
exclusively to interesting adults in agriculture and household art. 
It has selected its subjects for discussion and chosen its instruction 
with this in view. A new field of activity has suddenly opened 
up, one that is altogether unoccupied and for which no adequate 
provision has yet been made — the vocational training in agricul- 
ture of country youth between 14 and 18 or 19 years of age. 
After 14 the public school does not and, as at present con- 
stituted, can not reach the majority of rural youth with agricul- 
tural instruction. What the secondary schools may ultimately 
