THE NEW AGRICULTURE 
207 
contact with men and affairs. This is not fair, you say ; and 
yet how often is expert advice met by farmers with dogged 
silence, or sometimes with such frankness as "I don’t want 
any book lamin’; nobody from Washington need tell me 
how to raise corn.” There always appear on the scene, in 
slightly varying dress, the same old hindrances, — ignorance 
and isolation. 
Still, how can it reasonably be expected that natures which 
for years have been chilled by a lonely, breadwinning life, 
and which perhaps have been further stiffened by local or 
family prejudices passed down with the farm (for a prejudice 
is sometimes as real as a mortgage), will suddenly warm to 
a cooperative suggestion ? This would be asking too much. 
The effective use of cooperation, — its technic, so to speak, 
— can come only with practice. 
And yet, is association for a common cause so artificial a 
means of attaining results ? Is it merely a floating spar, to be 
clutched at in social shipwreck and then tossed aside when 
the unfortunates have drifted safely to shore ? No ; it is a force 
which underlies and shapes the whole structure of society. 
Possibly some of the phrases commonly used in connection 
with evolution, — ” struggle for existence,” ’'survival of the 
fittest,” and other biological terms, — may be a little mis- 
leading ; they may be responsible for the assumption that the 
great fundamental law of life is competition. There is really 
no foothold for such a belief, although no one would deny 
that competition has its place. 
Within recent years research has brought to light the great 
social impulses that belong to all primitive peoples, as well as 
those social impulses shown to be dominant even among ani- 
mals, — for animals enjoy many hitherto unsuspected forms 
of social life.i Science, indeed, leaves no room for doubt 
1 Kropotkin, Mutual Aid. 
