Editorial Page of the American 
American 
Agriculturist 
Founded 1842 
Henry Morgenthau, Jr . Publisher 
E. R. Eastman . Editor 
Fred W. Ohm . Associate Editor 
Mrs. G. E. Forbush . Household Editor 
Birge Kinne . Advertising Manager 
E. C. Weatherby . Circulation Manager 
CONTRIBUTING STAFF 
Jared Van Wagenen, Jr. G. T. Hughes H. E. Cook 
Published Weekly by 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST, INC. 
Address all correspondence for editorial, advertising, or subscription de¬ 
partments to 
461 Fourth Ave., New York, N. Y. 
Entered as Second-Class Matter, December 15, 1922, at the Post Office 
at New York, N. Y. under the Act of March 3, 1879. 
Subscription price, payable in advance, $1 a year, $2 for three 
years, $3 for five years. Canadian and foreign, $2 a year. 
VOL. 114 September 20, 1924 No. 12 
School Days 
“School days, school days, 
Dear old golden rule days, 
Reading, and writing, and ’rithmetic, 
Taught to the tune of the hick’ry stick '’— 
A LL over the land the school bells are ringing 
, again after the long vacation. On our way 
to work into the fields or office, as we hear them 
ring, and as we see the thousands of little tots 
going down the street or country road, there will 
be some of us, as there always have been, who will 
wonder “if all this education business is worth 
while.” 
Certainly we have the right to do some ques¬ 
tioning, when we come to pay our school taxes, 
for they are the largest single item of our tax bill. 
There is no doubt either that of all the millions 
that are going into education some of it is being 
misspent and some of it wasted. There is any 
amount of room for improvement. 
But when it comes to the general question as to 
whether or not education pays, there can be but 
one answer. It not only pays, it is an absolute 
necessity. Without it, America could never have 
been possible. The building of the log school- 
houses by our pioneer fathers was second only 
to the building of the log cabins and the com¬ 
munity church. Well they knew that a govern¬ 
ment of the people could not succeed if the people 
were illiterate. 
Universal education is objected to by some 
because they claim there is danger that we will 
have nobody left to do the heavy work of the 
nation. Always in the old days the aristocracy 
fought any tendency toward the education of the 
masses. They knew full well that their own 
security depended upon keeping poor people in 
ignorance. This “mud-sill” theory was shown 
up by Lincoln years ago. He said: 
“According to that theory, a blind horse upon a 
treadmill is a perfect illustration of what a laborer 
should be, all the better for being blind that he 
may not kick understandingly. 
“According to that theory, the education of 
laborers is not only useless, but pernicious and 
dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a 
misfortune that laborers should have heads at all. 
Those same heads are regarded as explosive 
materials, only to be safely kept in damp places, as 
far as possible from that peculiar sort of fire which 
ignites them. A Yankee who could invent a strong¬ 
handed man without a head would receive the 
everlasting gratitude of the ‘mud-sill’ advocates. 
“But free labor says No. Every head should be 
cultivated and improved by whatever will add to 
its capacity for performing its charge. In one 
word, free labor insists upon universal education.” 
Commenting upon this in Harper's Monthly, 
David F. Houston, formerly Secretary of Agricul¬ 
ture, says: 
“I agree with Lincoln. I am not prepared to 
surrender my most cherished conviction that only 
through true education may the masses of men 
hope to attain higher levels of right living, effi¬ 
ciency, and well-being, and democratic institutions 
be assured of stability and permanence. The 
people of the nation may be badly or wrongly 
educated, but they will never be over-educated.” 
So as the school bells ring and the young folks, 
big and little, go down the road to district school, 
high school or college, most of us will be glad to see 
them go. Most of us will try to give them an 
encouraging lift over some of the hard places; 
and the majority of us, knowing that we cannot 
leave our children much in the way of material 
possessions, will be glad if we can have a hand in 
leaving them something that neither moth nor 
rust can corrupt, nor thieves break through nor 
steal—a right education. 
The State Fair 
A T the time of the World Fair at St. Louis, 
„ years ago, there was a song that grew to be 
quite popular that started off something like this: 
“Meet me at St. Louis, Louie, 
Meet me at the Fair.” 
Sitting in the American Agriculturist tent 
at the New York State Fair this year, we were 
reminded quite forcibly of that old song. You will 
remember that in a recent issue we called atten¬ 
tion to our plans for putting on a concrete demon¬ 
stration of the American Agriculturist at the 
Fair. We had a very large tent, and in this tent 
were many of the samples of the merchandise 
which were advertised in American Agricultur¬ 
ist^ together with charts and other display 
material showing what we are trying to do in the 
way of publishing a worth-while farm paper. 
Birge Kinne, of our staff, was responsible for the 
exhibit in the tent, and he and his assistants can 
feel fully repaid for all of their work by the large 
amount of interest shown by our friends when 
they visited the tent. 
In spite of the rain and the cold, disagreeable 
weather, thousands of people visited us and a 
count showed an average on one of the rainy days 
of something like fifty people in the tent every 
ten minutes. We made no special effort either 
in the tent or elsewhere on the grounds to em¬ 
barrass people by urging them to subscribe to the 
paper. We preferred to have the paper speak 
for itself. 
It did give all of our staff an opportunity to 
renew old acquaintances and to make new friends. 
After all, that is the best part of any fair or picnic. 
Exhibits are worth while, but the real pleasure 
of such an occasion is in shaking hands with old 
friends and finding out how the world has been 
using them since w r e last saw them. 
iRead This to Your Boys 
P ERHAPS the finest thing about this nation of 
ours is that it is, and always has been, truly 
the land of opportunity. Pick any ten leaders 
in any walk of American life, either in the past or 
present, and it will be found that more than half 
of them every time had no start in life except 
their own ambition and ability. 
A few years ago a party of railroad presidents 
was on its way in a private car to attend a con¬ 
ference in Chicago. Looking out of the train in 
the early morning, one of them saw a boy starting 
a herd of cows from the pasture to the barn for 
the early milking. It was a cold fall morning, 
and the boy was barefooted. Every time he 
would drive up a cow from where she had lain 
during the night, he would stand on the warm 
place for a moment to warm his feet. 
The railroad president called the incident to 
the attention of the other men, and it developed 
that some eight out of the ten had had a similar 
experience. 
The Governor of the Empire State was once a 
newsboy on the streets of New York City. The 
President of these United States was born and 
raised in a little farmhouse where his father still 
lives, which is far more hum ole than most of the 
homes where American Agriculturist is read. 
The man who perhaps has had more responsibil¬ 
ity for bringing about world peace than anyone 
else, not excepting even General Dawes, is Owen 
D. Young. Mr. Young was born and reared on 
his father’s farm at Vanhornesville, Herkimer 
American Agriculturist, September 20, 1924 
Agriculturist 
County, New York. He still runs the old place 
and returns there often. He says that he likes 
to get away to this farm and perch on a rail fence 
to think out his hard problems. With his charac¬ 
teristic smile, he says: “I sit and think, but 
mostly sit.” 
One of the newspapers of Germany has chris¬ 
tened Mr. Young, “Owen the First.” When 
General Dawes was making his study with the 
Reparations Committee he was closely associated 
with Mr. Young, and turned to him constantly 
for advice and information about the intricate 
problems of Europe and Germany’s financial 
difficulties. It was General Dawes himself who 
said: “Go and talk with Young. He knows more 
about it than anybody else.” 
, When it came to setting up the machinery 
which will practically rule Germany under the 
Dawes plan, it was agreed by all the Powders that 
Young was the one man who could do it. 
But the interesting thing to farmers is that this 
man, regarded as one of the most powerful figures 
in the world, comes of a farmer breed. His family 
has tilled the same farm since 1750. His ancestors 
fought in the War of 1812. As a boy, Owen 
himself drove in the cows, helped to milk them, 
and took the milk to a cheese factory at Van¬ 
hornesville. It is said that, like Lincoln, he took 
books with him into the fields. One wonders which 
got the most attention, farm work or books. 
One day he went to the county court at Coopers- 
town and became interested in studying law. 
But it was difficult to get money to send him to 
school and college. Finally, through the help 
of an uncle, he started school at the academy at 
East Springfield, and every morning his father 
took him to school with a cheese box containing 
food enough to last the week. Then the father 
borrowed a thousand dollars and sent Owen to 
St. Lawrence University. From there he went 
to Boston Law School, and on graduation, his 
advancement was rapid. 
The name of Owen D. Young will go down 
in history as one of a few men who did so much 
for humanity by helping to bring to an end the 
European chaos following the World War. His 
name will also be pointed to with pride by Ameri¬ 
can farmers as another of the many great leaders 
of American life who started their careers as 
barefoot farm boys, chasing the cows out of the 
hilly pasture lot. _ 
Eastman’s Chestnuts 
NE of the things that used to be utterly dis¬ 
couraging to me as a boy was to work all 
day with a hoe in a corn, or potato field chopping 
out quackgrass, then to lay off for a welcome 
rest on a rainy day, and return to find the quack 
showing between the hoed rows as green and as 
flourishing as ever. To me, there is something 
peculiarly eternal and persistently everlasting 
about the way grass, particularly quackgrass, 
always comes back. It is the irony of fate that 
the grass which we as farmers may tramp on for 
a lifetime or ruthlessly cut at haying time, always 
in the end turns the tables on us by growing over 
our graves. 
“Ye were many, ye were mighty, and your feet 
they trampled hard. 
They have trampled down the mountains and 
the sea; 
Aye, the sea ye have conquered, but within 
this quiet Yard 
It is I, the Grass, am master; hark to me.” 
Perhaps you will think that this is strange talk 
in a corner where you are supposed to get a joke, 
but maybe there is something of grim humor in 
the way grass conquers us all in the end. We can 
painfully grub it out with a hoe, bury it with a 
plow, starve it by fallowing, but if quackgrass is 
once well rooted, it will still show green between 
the corn rows, long after our hoe and plow have 
rusted out, and long after we ourselves have ceased 
to care. 
The one and only remedy for quackgrass was 
well stated by the farmer who said that he had 
fought it, and wrestled with it, boy and man, for 
forty years, but at last he had concluded that 
“THE ONLY CURE FOR IT IS TO DIE 
AND LEAVE IT!” 
