38 
« very man can afford these Investments. He may not be prepared to use them 
Intelligently and therefore profitably. The result is in many communities that 
we have a large number of sales annually. Men whose lives have been spent 
in rural pursuits restlessly turn from the farm to ordinary labor as a means 
of livelihood. The result is an absenteeism on the farm. City men and men 
<>f s e moans have been buying land either as a safe or speculative investment 
The result is a species of landlordism on the one hand and of inferior farming 
on the other. Under such conditions it may not he expected that renters' sons 
will remain on the farm and become the sturdy yeomanry of the country. 
Neither is it probable that the children of these people will manifest any 
great interest in agricultural education. There is a manifest tendency toward 
intelligent farming. It is evident that the old methods are often expensive to 
the point of wastefulness. Men lacking education are not profitable even as 
employees. Much less are they capable of satisfactory service as farm mana- 
gers for owners of land. Such people are now moving to our cities for ordinary 
day labor, in the hope that their children may sometime become clerks or suh- 
ordinates in the great whirl of commerce. They are unfit for the farm, are 
prejudiced against it. are unwilling to fit themselves for it. and eventually 
swell the population that inhabits the cheapest quarters in our cities or ekes 
out a miserable existence in a small village. Such people are not needed on 
the farm, and eventually they become superfluous in the town or city. 
(3) A third specification among these conditions lies in the difficulty in bring- 
ing town or city people to rural life. They are quite willing, many of them, to 
live at a convenient distance from the city with a large investment in a small 
area of ground for personal comfort and a certain type of luxury that only the 
country can bring, hut they are not easily brought to do the actual farm work 
necessary for the development of agriculture. We can not conceive of a country 
as a city, made up of town lots of 10 to 20 acres in area. The truth is that the 
City-bred people have little conception of what rural life really is. Many of 
them have an exaggerated prejudice concerning it. The training in action, asso- 
ciations, exciting amusements, and all that go to make up the externalities of 
city life unite to unfit an individual for the peaceful pursuits of rural living. 
Whatever hope there is, therefore, for the rural districts must eventually come 
from the rural districts themselves. It is to the population on the farm that we 
must turn for the perpetuity and improvement of rural life. The record made 
in the past by choice rural individuals in the city has greatly helped and im- 
proved the city. I see no evidence that the city will ever help or improve the 
country. The agricultural college, therefore, will find one of its most pressing 
and important problems in the country itself. It may be very entertaining and 
quite fashionable to chat in a city parlor about the beauties of agriculture, but 
the real problems of agriculture are on the farm and not in the drawing room. 
(4) A fourth specification is the question of profits. There is uo doubt that 
men desire to make money and that the profit in farming determines the atti- 
tude of many lor or against this pursuit. Many young men leave the farm 
because they see that their fathers have spent a life without accumulating much 
money and because the fathers oftentimes complain that they have not made 
money. It is not uncommon under these conditions to see a greatly impover- 
ished farm associated with an unfilled purse. As an individual question, we 
can not blame any man for having a desire for an improved condition. We 
can not ask him to stay in a place where there is no prospect of improvement. 
If he were willing to do this he would be fitted neither for a farmer nor for a 
business man. It is not, therefore, the personal phase of this question that I 
am now suggesting. It is rather the general question of profit in farming as 
having to do with the tendency away from the farm. We recognize that the 
speculative values in farm lands constitute no part of ordinary farming. The 
man who buys cheap land at $10 per acre and holds it for ten years and finds 
it worth $30 per acre has not made money by farming; he has made money by 
speculative investment in farming lands. As soon as it is realized that this 
speculative value is an uncertain quantity the attractiveness of such investments 
ceases. Multitudes of farmers can not be and ought not to be speculators ; they 
should he farmers, and the problem is to make them profitable farmers. In the 
consideration of this question we must recognize the impoverished condition of 
much of the farming land of our country. To he sure we have recognized this 
as a fact. I appeal now to recognize it as a condition* a condition that threat- 
ens the permanent usefulness of the farm and the farmer. I find a very wide- 
spread belief that much of our farming land never can he made profitable for 
the individual farmer. If this is a permanent condition our colleges and experi- 
